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, outlining 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, and their asset management and operations departments currently use Brightly Confirm functionality, processes and solution development to achieve their organisational goals.
CCTV & Fibre
BNET (Bristol Network) is a 200-km-long ducting and fibre communications network owned by BCC that has been around for 15 years. It was originally purchased from Rediffusion, a cable TV pioneer, and supports all of the authority’s requirements, including telephony, data, traffic related network communications and CCTV.
Bristol City Council had an extensive GIS mapping registry of the fibre network, which included location of the ducts and manhole covers, however much of the network had not been recorded. This caused issues with digging enquiries to the council, often approving them in network locations, which would end up in the network getting damaged.
Inspections and maintenance activities were managed through paper-based processes, with records stored in multiple places. Ultimately, the council had no centralised way of managing the network, the faults or timescales of fault resolution.
Project
In 2019, BCC finalised an ITT for a revised Fibre 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 ensure the contractor was held accountable for the management and maintenance of the network.
With Confirm’s flexible asset register, Keith and Emma were able to work through templates that were already present for Highways and Streetlighting asset types, scoping out how they would modify for CCTV and Fibre, before engaging with the Brightly Professional Services team.
Nick Vague, a Brightly lead consultant, configured preventative 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.
Brightly Confirm creates quality in contract meetings and enables continuous improvement of operations.
Emma Howarth
Service Delivery Manager
What’s next
The expansion of Confirm to incorporate CCTV and Fibre has given BCC the ability to look at what’s next.
To continue improving BNET’s asset register, Emma is looking to take the detail of the asset register to include each wire within the fibre 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.
The volume of planned, preventative maintenance checks can also be monitored to determine how many are being done versus how many should be done, something that has not been recorded before.
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
Risk management
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Ability to incorporate Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and turnaround times into works management
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Paperless process, so all records held within system
Data visualisation
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Dashboards and data collection in Confirm has enabled BCC
to look at volume of jobs, SLAs, monitor 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 Fibre 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
• Bring in expectations from contractors that weren’t there before
• Triage process introduced to streamline business process
• Weekly review of jobs with contractors and transparency of process
• Enhanced management of faults
