AUSRAIL
DIGITALLY ENABLED ASSETS:
INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT FOR THE 20S by Julian Watts, Director, Engineering & Asset Management, KPMG Australia
The need to leverage digital is paramount to being an efficient infrastructure owner, manager or operator. To best embrace and realise benefits from digital enablers, a strategy for how they will be used across the organisation in a joined up manner is needed. This ensures that workflows are end-to-end and that information has traceability to enable high confidence decisions.
DRIVERS TO LEVERAGE DIGITAL With the complexity of modern infrastructure management, operations and maintenance, there are now many distinct variables that can impact stakeholder outcomes. To efficiently deal with this complexity, many of the process and workflows need to be automated. The decision-making leavers for any organisation need to be responsive to changing customer needs and the forecasted needs of infrastructure assets that deliver the service. Traditional manual decision-making methods are becoming obsolete when the volume of near real-time and dynamic data is truly connected and streams into enterprise platforms. Furthermore, stakeholders are requiring more transparency in decision-making and traceability to source data. There is little room for subjective options and therefore leveraging a digital approach is a preferred route. Price limitations have been a challenge when introducing new technology and approaches. It is not until a solution is cheaper and the outcome is better, that organisations have the appetite to change traditional methods. Technology like cloud computing, digital design and automated monitoring has advanced to a point that cost is no longer a reason not to adopt. WHAT ARE DIGITALLY ENABLED ASSETS? Digitally Enabled Assets are those which are designed by a digital vision, managed throughout the lifecycle by digital processes and are supported by a workforce that leverages digital to provide insights through analytics and make the most informed decisions. The diagram to the right describes some of the building blocks for digital considerations across the operating model for infrastructure management. These building blocks may materialise as individual digital twins that can be brought together under a connected family of twins.
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November 2020 // Issue 17
DIGITALLY ENABLED ASSET VISION A digitally enabled asset strategy is needed to capture the voice of customers and stakeholders leveraging platforms like social media to distil public sentiment. Utilising existing public strategies such as the Transport for NSW Digital Engineering Framework, the Victorian Digital Asset Strategy, or the Smart Cities Council Digital Twin Guidance Note, are a good starting place. This can then feed into a more dynamic strategy formation that captures inputs from across the organisation to ensure a balanced view that is supported by management, finance, HR, IT, engineering and operations. DIGITALLY ENABLED LIFECYCLE Digitally enabled asset planning drives a more robust way for understanding forecasted needs of asset interventions. By capturing performance and condition information about assets in a structured manner, we are able to automatically draw correlations and leverage machine learning to propose optimal interventions that humans can then make the ultimate decision on. Digitally enabled asset procurement practices mean that sharing the right existing asset information with the supply chain can be seamless and provide the opportunity to ‘try before you buy’ in an integrated common data environment. Digitally enabled asset design has been a staple for several decades, however, it continues to evolve to leverage
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