Project owners who have linear capital assets such as railways, metros, trams, highways, roads, gas and oil pipelines, sewage tunnel systems, and power transmission networks among others, have always required identifying and recording the details of all major maintenance and recapitalization projects required to avoid or mitigate any disruption or interruption for the operations and services provided by those assets. Usually, the requirement for those projects is provided by the maintenance and operation department as well as other departments that are responsible for improving and upgrading the operations of those assets.
To achieve this objective successfully, a solution needs to capture the details of all those assets as well as capture and align the major maintenance and recapitalization projects with those assets. The solution needs to have the functionality to capture single-location assets as well as linear assets. For example, for a metro system, the single location assets will include the different metro stations, metro maintenance, operations and workshop facilities, and metro control centers among others. The metro system’s linear assets will include the above-ground, above-ground elevated, and underground railway network.
Using a Project Management Information System (PMIS) that has asset management and project management functionalities like PMWeb, project owners can have a single integrated platform for identifying, recording the details, and managing the execution of major maintenance and recapitalization projects for their portfolio of linear capital assets. PMWeb asset location module will be used to identify the details of all existing locations and linear assets. Each asset will be assigned a unique location identity for which all required details will be captured such as condition, type, year in service, spatial latitude, longitude, and elevation values among many others. In addition, PMWeb specification allows identifying an unlimited number of user-defined groups and values within each group to capture all needed details for the identified asset. Those user-defined fields can be configured to capture text, currency, numbers, dates, Boolean and data from a predefined list of values.
Unlike single location assets where there will be a single spatial latitude, longitude, and elevation values, a linear asset will include a beginning and ending spatial latitude, longitude, and elevation values as well as other spatial latitude, longitude, and elevation values to capture the location, direction and approximate length of the linear asset. PMWeb Google map interface allows capturing all those spatial points for the linear asset which could be the above-ground, above-ground elevated, and underground rail network.
For both single and linear asset locations, if there is a need to break down the location into segments, PMWeb allows the identification of the buildings or segments for linear assets. In addition to the unlimited fields that can be captured at those levels, PMWeb also captures the spatial location details for each segment of the linear asset or building for a single location asset. Further, and for single-location assets, PMWeb also allows the creation of two more location levels for each building. Those are the floor and space (office, lobby, shop, etc.) levels.
In case there is a need to capture the details of specific equipment assets at any single or linear location, the PMWeb asset equipment module can be used to capture all possible details on the equipment asset. For example, those could include the equipment manufacturer’s name, and condition among many others.
Similar to all other PMWeb project management processes, pictures, drawings, videos, and other documents that are associated with each single or linear location, building, floor level, space, and equipment can be uploaded and attached directly to those records or uploaded and stored in PMWeb document management repository and then attached to their relevant records. In addition, links to relevant PMWeb records and imported MS Outlook emails can be added to each process transaction.
The next phase is to capture the details of all major maintenance and recapitalization projects that could become part of the linear asset recapitalization program. As those projects will be at a very early stage, only critical and available information will be captured. The project information will be updated when more details become known and available. Each project will be linked to its relevant single or linear asset location.
It should be noted that all projects identified at all single or linear asset locations, whether approved, rejected, or pending decision to proceed or shelve, will be displayed on their relative recapitalization program. PMWeb program module will be used to capture the details of all recapitalization programs that the organization intends to invest in with all identified projects regardless of their status. The recapitalization programs will include all programs that the project owner might execute on his own or programs that could be delivered under Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) programs.
All those identified projects will be consolidated in a single report where for each recapitalization program, those projects will be reported showing all needed details. Visuals can be added to summarize the information captured in those projects regardless of their status.
The information captured for the recapitalization programs and associate projects will also be available to executive stakeholders who might need to display the location of single and linear assets locations for those projects. The dashboard provides oversight of those projects as well as their reported performance when they are being executed. Since PMWeb allows capturing all those assets and project details on a single data source, there is virtually no limit or restriction on how to report a single version of the truth of the complete assets and project portfolio that the project owner has.
