Effective and Efficient IT Investment 20th May, The Welcombe Hotel, Stratford-upon-Avon
The Welcombe Hotel once again provided the impressive setting for this year’s Stratford Upon Avon Event. This is now a firm fixture in the AMT-SYBEX calendar and as in previous years the attendance from across the infrastructure industries sector was strong with some 50 delegates participating on the day. Companies represented included National Grid, United Utilities and GE Energy and the overall aim of the day was to provide an open and challenging forum within which the delegates could share knowledge and learn from the experience of sector colleagues in the area of “Effective and Efficient IT Investment”
Mike Duggan, Senior Business Director at AMT-SYBEX, opened proceedings with a context setting introduction during which he underlined the hugely challenging climate within which all those present were having to operate. Challenges beyond those which the sector always faced were of course the credit crunch, but also now the serious threat of a flu pandemic and the destabilising effect of the political sleaze which had emerged via the MP’s expenses scandals. Companies had largely already made their key investments in terms of systems and the demand now was to get more and more value out of those investments – and this equated not necessarily to a need to work harder but rather a need to work “smarter”.
The agenda for the rest of the day was:
09.45 – 10.30 Alan Scott, Principal consultant, AMT-SYBEX: Extending, Enhancing and Embedding Ellipse.
Alan echoed Mike’s view that there was a real need to fully exploit core systems such as Ellipse and aimed his presentation at highlighting those new areas of Ellipse development which ought to be of common interest to companies in the sector:
- Manage capital spend
- Inspections and asset inventory
- Dashboards/data warehouses
- Web enablement
10.30 – 11.15 Steve Wood, Senior Consultant AMT-SYBEX/Dave Hawkins, Marketing Customer Support Manager, GE Energy – Europe: Can the integration of core systems support a step change in business performance?
The focus here was on how to join up core systems which in individual terms were already being fully exploited – the end result ideally delivering one highly efficient asset management architecture. Key in this was the assimilation of huge amounts of data from the likes of SCADA and customer calls and the requirement to then push this out into the field to react, respond, repair etc. By linking the likes of GIS, SCADA, Asset and Work Management, Defect capture etc it was possible to develop a single view of asset performance and move towards optimisation, accurate analysis and scheduling of work. To illustrate the concept Steve and David delivered a very interesting case study on a pilot solution delivered recently to EDF Energy around distributed generation.
11.45 – 12.30 Ian Cartledge, Plan Build Manager, /Rob Wilson, Plan Development Team Leader, National Grid: Planning For Success (P4S) One Year On.
This presentation was all the more of interest to delegates as it was actually the result of strong feedback from last year’s Stratford Upon Avon Event; where delegates had shown very real appetite for a future update. Ian reset the capex spend scene for National Grid, which at a high level sees them with a need to spend £800million/year for about the next 7 years to deliver the network replacement programme. Put in context this is around 3 times National Grid’s normal annual capex programme. There then followed an excellent presentation by both speakers on the structure and approach which the programme had adopted and an update as to where the P4S programme had got to. This demonstrated clearly that the implementation was virtually complete and that P4S was now the “business as usual” planning process for National Grid. As had been pointed out last year the long planning cycle (up to 7 years) means that the real benefits will not be fully realised until 2011 and onwards but there was already clear evidence of the step change the programme had delivered to National Grid’s planning capability.
In completing the presentation Ian shared with delegates the key lessons learnt from the Project, perhaps most important of all being the need for cross directorate collaboration and the need to create and maintain a “virtuous circle” of support at senior level. This was followed with a very lively debate and Q&A session from the floor.
13.45 – 14.30 Glyn Hughes, Water Operations Asset Information Manager, United Utilities: Exploiting Ellipse – United Utilities Journey.
Glyn gave a very useful walk through the history of Ellipse in UU which dated back some 6 years. From the initial investment and implementation UU had made a strategic decision around 2-3 years ago as part of their World Class Asset Management Programme to position Ellipse as the prime asset repository. By employing a number of mini strategies which included simple screen customisations to improve user friendliness, better communication and improved access about and to the system and a programme of embedding and retraining UU has greatly improved the staff familiarity and perception of Ellipse to the point where it is now viewed as the key enabling system which the original investment had hoped for. Ongoing efforts in the area of greater data understanding continue to drive further value and business benefit from the system.
Following a final Open Forum session during which delegates tabled questions on a range of subjects which had emerged during the day’s session the Event was closed at around 3.30pm.
To download the PowerPoint presentations given on the day, please follow the links below:
Steve Wood, Senior Consultant AMT-SYBEX/Dave Hawkins, Marketing Customer Support Manager, GE Energy – Europe: Can the integration of core systems support a step change in business performance?
David Hawkins and Steve WoodRob Wilson, Plan Development Team Leader, National Grid: Planning For Success (P4S) One Year On.
Rob Wilson