Background
In 2023, Co-Lab was finding it challenging to track the status of contractors who were delivering and fulfilling transport contracts to councils. While the data existed, it was buried deep within a series of spreadsheets that required extensive mining. Co-Lab was looking for a strategic asset management partner to consult on efficiently managing and tracking the contracts while also creating a mechanism to improve the economic and environmental well-being of the ten city, district, and regional councils that Co-Lab represents.
Challenge:
As a part of the consultation, Co-Lab was seeking to address four specific contract tracking questions:
- What is the overall progress displayed against the progress statuses of:
- Programmed (To do), In Progress, and Loaded in RAMM (Done)?
- What is the progress of the work during the financial year by week?
- What is the financial expenditure of the work during the financial year by month?
- How do you overlay the visual location on a map with the contracted work and asset work status?
Solution:
Through a series of consultations with Co-Lab, based on decades of subject matter expertise in transport and asset management and experience from partnering with NZTA Waka Kotahi on the Transport Insights project, Company-X proposed a strategic higher-level solution that relied on data science and amalgamated the experience into a single experience that surfaced transparent insights for all parties.
Company-X’s Hamilton, New Zealand head office is within 25 kilometres of Co-Lab’s Cambridge office enabling Company-X to easily place a staff member on-site at Co-Lab. In-person strategy meetings were held weekly and the ability to showcase and iterate the development of the Co-Lab Contract Tracking Portal was seamless. This also enabled feedback to be quickly relayed to the development team and, depending on the effort of the request, it could be showcased again on the same day.
The process of developing the dashboard was excellent. The end product is a professional looking dashboard which we can use to communicate to our council customers the status of contracts that we run on behalf of our councils.
Cameron Senior
Asset Information Team Lead
Co-Lab
Outcome
Broken down according to the well-beings, the benefits of this project can be primarily categorised into two of the four well beings:
Economic Well-being
- Reduced time and resource required to track and configure contracts by half a day per week.
- Reduced contractor reporting time to track projects.
Social Well-being
- Improved transparency and the ability to quickly reconcile reported differences in progress.
- Improved transparency to see the status of the contracts and how they’re tracking.
- Improved sense of contractor accountability with those delivering the contracts.
20%
Savings of one day per week of an FTE’s work.
10
Cities, districts, and regional councils amalgamated into a single system.
