Background
Bristol is one of the 10 biggest cities in the UK with 459,300 residents. The wider city region has over one million. And it’s estimated that Bristol’s city population will exceed 500,000 as early as 2027.
Bristol City Council (BCC) is an innovative council, with a smart city strategy called Connecting Bristol that outlines ambitions for the next five years. BCC aims to strengthen the city’s digital foundations, so that it becomes well connected and better poised to deliver the technological innovation needed to keep the city moving, healthy and safe, in a sustainable way.
BCC is one of the most transformative and ambitious city authorities. Their asset management and operations departments currently use Confirm functionality, processes and solution development to achieve their organizational goals.
Managing Bristol’s CCTV and fiber network
BNET (Bristol Network) is a 200-km-long ducting and fiber communications network that BCC has owned for 15 years. It was originally purchased from Rediffusion, a cable TV pioneer, and supports all the authority’s requirements, including telephony, data, traffic-related network communications and CCTV.
Bristol City Council had an extensive GIS mapping registry of the fiber network, which included location of the ducts and manhole covers. However, much of the network had not been recorded. This caused issues when the council approved digging enquiries in network locations, which would result in digs damaging the network.
Inspections and maintenance activities were managed through paper-based processes, with records stored in multiple places. Ultimately, the council had no centralized way of managing the network, the faults or timescales of fault resolution.
Asset management in revised fiber and CCTV contract
In 2019, BCC finalized an ITT (Invitation to Tender) for a revised fiber and CCTV contract. A key component of this contract was asset management: location of the asset and the management of it (e.g., fault repair). The use of Confirm was written into this contract.
Emma Howarth, BCC’s Service Delivery Manager, worked with Keith Featherstone, BCC’s super user, to define processes in Confirm that would support their improvement of management of the network. They also engaged their new contractor, Chroma Vision, in this process to make sure that the contractor was held accountable for the management and maintenance of the network.
With Confirm’s flexible asset register, Featherstone and Howarth were able to work through templates that were already present for highways and streetlight asset types, scoping out how they would modify for CCTV and fiber, before engaging with the Brightly Professional Services team. (Brightly was later acquired by Siemens.)
Nick Vague, a lead consultant, configured preventive maintenance inspections and works management using the Confirm Way Model. Initial training was provided internally by the super user around principles and dashboards. Nick then delivered remote training around inspections and work management for both contractor and client.
Planning for what’s next
The expansion of Confirm to incorporate CCTV and fiber has given BCC the ability to look at what’s next. To continue improving BNET’s asset register, Howarth is looking to take the detail of the asset register to include each wire within the fiber coil.
The data gathered in Confirm will be used to delve deeper into the current SLAs, to determine whether they are realistic or need readjusting. BCC can also monitor the volume of planned, preventive maintenance checks to determine how many are being done versus how many should be done, something they had not recorded before.
“Confirm creates quality in contract meetings and enables continuous improvement of operations,” says Howarth.
Overall, BCC is pleased with the uptake and use by their contractors, and they have a positive outlook for the future and success of the project.
Benefits of Confirm for BCC
Risk management
- Ability to incorporate Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and turnaround times into works management
- Paperless process, so all records held within system
Data visualization
- Dashboards and data collection in Confirm for viewing volume of jobs, SLAs as well as monitoring completion
- Visibility of assets
Data validation
- Use of ConfirmConnect mobile application to accurately locate CCTV assets, with open API to Collector App used to locate fiber network, so central asset record is kept up to date
- Expected standard with contractors to improve the asset register
- Improved data accuracy and central validated source of truth
- Continual improvement of asset register and responsibility for contractor to update if incorrect
Contract management/governance
- Increased visibility on spending and control around cost
- Bringing in expectations from contractors that weren’t there before
- New triage process to streamline business process
- Weekly review of jobs with contractors and transparency of process
- Enhanced management of faults