Official BUSRide Roundtable Discussion: Enterprise Asset Management by Power Trade Media

Official BUSRide Roundtable Discussion: Enterprise Asset Management

Download the Motorcoach risk management and loss prevention: Volume 1 eBook

BUSRIDE | E N T E R P R I S E A S S E T M A N A G E M E N T

busride.com

Contents The Future of EAM By Afthab Zainudeen 4 EAM data and actionable business intelligence By Kevin Price 5 About Xerox

About Infor

busride.com | BUSRIDE

BUSRide spoke with Afthab Zainudeen, senior solution architect in public transportation at Xerox, about the future of enterprise asset management (EAM) systems – how recent improvements will shape tomorrow’s system integration and data collection, management and analysis. Please provide an overview of the current market with regard to EAM. In the current market, there are several EAM options available that are marketed to transit agencies. However, there is no “one size fits all” that will track all of an agency’s assets. They also lack automation. Adoption of these systems has been very slow due to a lack of information about the availability and capabilities of these offerings, as well as resistance to change by the agencies. The reality is that the majority of transit agencies have a manual tracking method that is very time consuming and inefficient. The current market uses automated RFID tags integrated with GPS/ tag, accurately locating assets to their position in a yard or garage within feet of their actual location. These systems now integrate with operation dispatch systems to help track vehicles in the yard or garage for accurate assignments. Once you get past the buses – large equipment, tools, and high-value assets may or may not be tracked. If they are, many agencies still use asset number and manual tracking systems. If they use an RFID tag and back-end system, they only track possession of items, but not their actual location. This can ultimately lead to loss for the agency and additional costs to replace them. Having a standardized enterprise asset tracking system that tracks more than just vehicle location will help an agency to manage more efficiently. From the standpoint of the end-user agency, how have today’s EAM systems been streamlined over systems that were operating five years ago? Not so long ago, EAM was done manually with a person walking the yard with a paper pad, noting vehicle locations. Equipment was tracked by wall-to-wall inventories done on a regular basis. Now, with the advent of AVL/GPS, barcodes and RFID, the process has become automated and streamlined, providing up-to-date and accurate information, saving agencies man-hours and helping to reduce losses of smaller assets. Conversely, if you were to look five or 10 years into the future, what would EAM systems look like? In the future, agencies will not only be able to track where the asset is, but also the condition of the asset and its remaining useful life, as well as provide a method to track high-value consumables to help with inventory management and agency budgeting and planning. Standardization of RFID and GPS solutions will help transit agencies develop EAM specifications to OEM suppliers to include in procurements. This results in standard integration of EAM devices into OEM buses, providing added value for OEMs, consolidating procurements of systems into single procurements, as well as streamlining agency replacement and maintenance strategies. Agencies will be able to improve maintenance by tracking which assets get used most frequently. Maintenance and replacement schedules can be based on miles and hours versus monthly scheduled maintenance. They can also broaden the assets they 4

BUSRIDE | E N T E R P R I S E A S S E T M A N A G E M E N T

track. The technology exists today to track small items like handtools using a GPS location tag, giving agencies better control over all their valuable assets. Better maintenance of vehicles and equipment will result in more reliable, on-time service for passengers. The condition of the equipment that riders interact with (such as fareboxes, wheelchair lifts, destination sign systems and bike racks) directly relates to the experience of the rider. Integration of EAM with passenger information systems can provide added value to the rider. For example, sensors on bike racks that interact with the passenger information system will let riders know when the next arriving bus has room for their bike. What changes do you foresee in system integration in the future? Standardization of technologies will allow for easier integration with back-end systems and, combined with better infrastructure in garages, will improve automation of yard and maintenance operations and reduce manual processes. Automated bus assignments and tracking will soon get to a point that operators will know before they enter the yard where they are going. When an asset is put out-of-service, operators will automatically be reassigned. What role do you believe open architecture will play in EAM systems in the future? Interoperability with no more proprietary systems will result in greater competition, which will drive down costs. It will also allow for easier integration with systems that exist today, as well as emerging technologies, providing unseen possibilities to agencies down the road. How will data collection and analysis look in the future – and what will that mean for the operator? Today, we can display assets on the screen to tell where they are located, the health of the asset, and provide that information to the end-users (operator, yard supervisor or dispatcher) in real-time. Capturing additional data and metrics, and using more dynamic, realtime reporting tools and dashboards will provide agencies with more insights to make better decisions about fleet maintenance, staffing and other issues In addition to integrating data from different departments, agencies can integrate with other government systems. For example, if an operator’s license gets suspended, agencies are automatically updated and the operator is no longer qualified to use the asset in the system. Operator will be able to easily find the asset and know if an asset is in good state of repair and can be operated safely, and they will only be assigned to assets they are trained or certified to operate. For example, if a bus has new equipment installed, the system will only assign an operator that is trained and qualified to use it. How can agencies best use EAM data, especially as EAM systems are growing more advanced and collecting more and more data? How can an agency keep everything organized and easily actionable? Agencies need to become more data oriented. A unified transit database that combines AVL, I.T., human resources and operations can be used to provide real-time, dynamic reports. Dispatchers, supervisors, maintenance managers, transit planners and executives will have access to more accurate data. They can use this data in real-time, to make faster, better decisions on a daily basis, as well as for long-term planning and forecasting based on accurate, historical data. Afthab Zainudeen is the senior solution architect in public transportation at Xerox. Visit Xerox at https://www.xerox.com/en-us/services/transportationsolutions and follow them on Twitter and social media.

busride.com

EAM data and actionable business intelligence Take full advantage of what enterprise asset management tells you

BUSRide spoke with Kevin Price of Infor, New York, NY, about actionable business intelligence that transit agencies can derive from enterprise asset management (EAM) systems. Price, who is based in Greenville, SC, has more than 17 years in Infor’s asset management business, holding roles in sales and service, as asset solutions director for the Infor Public Sector group, and now product director for Infor EAM, MP2, Spear Technologies, and Infor CloudSuite Facilities Management. Scheduling is paramount for transit agencies and motorcoach operators – how can they best use EAM software to optimize fleet usage and scheduling? It depends on many different factors, the biggest being the risk variable of a given asset. Risk variables can include the asset’s age, the routes it drives and even whether there’s salt on the road. Understanding risk variables allows for efficient maintenance scheduling and will allow operators to automatically gauge vehicle availability and reliability. The availability and ability to schedule an asset really depends on its reliability at the time and how it’s maintained. Why is it so important for organizations to define their own parameters for success before delving into EAM data? The aforementioned risk assessment and liability survey is important because every environment is different. Vehicles behave and operate in Miami differently than they do in New York. Compound those different parameters by the variability in how operators use their fleets. Every operation is different, so no two sets of parameters for success are the same. How can bus operators use EAM systems to leverage inspection data and keep their fleets running in a fixed, measurable way? Operators maintain assets in different ways. The most basic method is reactive maintenance, or fixing things when they break down. Proactive maintenance involves understanding that regular maintenance is needed, but there’s not really a model in place. A third option is preventive maintenance, where maintenance is regularly scheduled and a policy is in place to enforce it.

We tackle maintenance with a predictive approach. Predictive maintenance incorporates analytical and inspection data to better understand when maintenance is required – to predict when an asset will fail. In our application, we do reliability-centered maintenance but we also do reliability planning and analysis, so we can take a lot of these inspection points and then use them to predict failure. It’s very important to get to predictive maintenance. It’s not as easy as everyone would think, because it involves a lot of data point gathering. However, if you can get there in a sustained way, it’s going to have a positive impact. For example, once it switched from manual data entry to an EAM system, a third-party maintenance provider to the transit industry was able to free up 14 clerks, which alone covered the costs of their mobile EAM project. Another transit agency was able to reduce the average monthly number of equipment system malfunctions affecting its service levels by 32 percent over a three-year service period after implementing a predictive EAM system. How will EAM develop in the near future? Will operators be able to manipulate even more disparate data points to better optimize their businesses? Absolutely, operators will be able to do so much more work with their EAM systems. Systems will be able to combine more conditionbased monitoring data that will be more readily available as the Internet of Things (IoT) matures. In a basic EAM system, there are 1,400 points of connection that we can get to. If we multiply those connections by the number of new connections that are being developed, there will be 15 billion points of data that we can capture every day. This will give agencies a better decision-making tree with real-time capabilities. I think a lot of that technology is available now, but it’s highly customized in the way it’s communicated. The future will be about making the technology generic in such a way that it’s available across the board. That should happen within the next decade. Kevin welcomes your feedback and questions. Please don’t hesitate to email him at kevin.price@infor.com.

busride.com | BUSRIDE

For more than 40 years, Xerox has worked hand-in-hand with transportation clients in over 30 countries delivering reliable solutions, consistently achieving results, and performing beyond expectations. We’re the largest provider of innovative mobility solutions to governments worldwide. From fare collection to toll solutions, from back-office processing to infrastructure installation, we provide systems and services that help solve intractable transportation problems. Public Transit From fare collection to intelligent transportation systems (ITS), we meet public transit daily operational challenges with innovative and efficient solutions. We help you reduce operational costs and improve services—whether through flexible payment methods such as electronic mobile wallet options or reliable schedules. We help make transit simple for passengers worldwide. As an integrator, we bring computer-aided dispatch/automatic vehicle location (CAD/AVL) systems, ITS technologies and fare collection solutions based on open standards for all modes of public transportation services. One of the best tools to help you reduce operational costs and improve services is data analytics. As populations escalate, the demands on the public transit systems become increasingly more complex. That’s why data analytics are now an essential component in the mass-transit decision-making toolbox. Learn about how you can make transit more efficient in our whitepaper: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Big Data in Transit Parking We develop, customize and integrate the best available parking technologies, and then help clients decide which work best for them. When we combine technology with our proven strategies for efficiently managing programs and minimizing risk, it leads directly to powerful results– every time. Here’s how it worked with the City of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation is on a mission to reduce traffic congestion and improve driver satisfaction. The agency made great strides with signal synchronization and online tools designed to get people to their destinations more quickly. Once there, however, motorists could spend 10 minutes or more driving around, looking for places to park. The problem? On-street parking prices did not match demand. Prices were uniform within a given area and were often the same, or cheaper, than garages a few blocks over. There was 6

BUSRIDE | E N T E R P R I S E A S S E T M A N A G E M E N T

no incentive to park a little further away. Imagine if the price for a home plate seat at Dodger Stadium was the same as a seat in the nose-bleed section; there’s going to be a significant imbalance of demand…and no one in the stands to watch the game. Could pricing be used as a mechanism to manage parking demand? Read the case study to find out. Tolling Our electronic toll collection (ETC) solutions address our customer’s business critical mobility problems. Our commitment for the future is based on ensuring that our customers have the solutions they need to intelligently manage their changing operating environment. Take our vehicle passenger detection system for example. High occupancy carpooling lanes are critical to combating roadway congestion. However, their benefits are severely limited when motorists do not abide by the rules. Our Vehicle Passenger Detection System is a HOV/HOT lane compliancy test system that uses video analytics to identify the number of occupants in a vehicle. Unlike competing solutions, the Vehicle Passenger Detection System identifies the number of occupants in a vehicle with better than 95 percent accuracy at speeds ranging from stop-and-go to 100 mph. What are the 5 most frequently asked questions about this solution? View the SlideShare deck to find out. Mobility Solutions At the center of transportation system is the traveler. Travelercentric transportation solutions are enabled by emerging technologies like ubiquitous computing and communications (such as smartphones and 4G or 5G networks), which can provide the information and big data analytics to determine the best transportation options in real time. Watch this short video on our locally-branded app that pairs with our transit and parking solutions. Becoming Conduent On January 29, 2016, Xerox announced its plans to separate into two independent, publicly traded companies – Xerox Corporation, which will be comprised of the company’s Document Technology and Document Outsourcing businesses, and Conduent Incorporated, a business process services company. Read more at: Xerox.com/transportation Contact us at: TLGMarketing@Xerox.com busride.com

B:8.75" T:8.25" S:7"

xerox.com/transportation

HELPING AGENCIES UNIFY FLEET OPERATIONS, SO PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION WORKS BETTER. S:9.45"

Our transportation solutions provide easy and convenient options for transit riders. Agency operations and rider experiences are better than ever before with the power of real-time information, fare solutions using open payment and mobile technology, and trip planning tools. Work can work better.

ABOUT

INFOR Infor EAM is the most configurable enterprise-grade asset management solution on the market. It gives you the power to improve capital asset management in ways that increase reliability, enhance predictive maintenance, ensure regulatory compliance, reduce energy usage, and support sustainability initiatives. Available in industry-specific editions, it also gives you unparalleled flexibility to zero in on the specialized, industry requirements that can turn your company’s asset management into a competitive advantage.

The Infor EAM advantage Infor EAM customers gain: • Up to 50% reduction in maintenance overtime, labor, and contractor costs • 20% reduction in maintenance material costs • 20% reduction in downtime • 20% or more in energy reductions • 5% reduction in new equipment costs • 10% increase in fleet availability • 50% increase in warranty cost recovery • 50% reduction in purchasing process costs

Visit www.infor.com for more information!

BUSRIDE | E N T E R P R I S E A S S E T M A N A G E M E N T

busride.com

Decrease maintenance costs with the right EAM software

Infor® EAM helps five of the ten busiest U.S. transit agencies improve compliance, efficiency, and asset optimization. • Predictive maintenance • Inventory control

• Mobile efficiency • Performance visibility

Find out how

infor.com/EAM

800.260.2640

www.busride.com

BUSRIDE | E N T E R P R I S E A S S E T M A N A G E M E N T

busride.com