NZ’s Asset Management Success Story Revealed – The Infrastructure Decision Support Project (Video)

Transcription

Good morning. My Name is Ross Waugh. And I’m here representing Inframanage.com and today in March 2016 we’re having a discussion with David Fraser and with Theuns Henning about IDS that is Infrastructure Decision Support.

In terms of infrastructure management, it’s actually one of New Zealand’s best keep secrets. And it is an industry-owned company that provides top-level optimized decision-making and analysis for particularly our transportation industry here in New Zealand and also for the water utility network industry as well.

David is the chairman of the IDS board and Theuns is the CEO.

Ross:   David you’ve been involved with IDS since the beginning. Tell me just a little bit about how it started and where it’s got to now.

David:   Thanks Ross. Yes, Ross, we started, I guess the concepts were back in the mid-90s, but in 1998, we identified that the dTIMS software was the software that would take our whole asset management in New Zealand to a new scale and a new ability to map the condition of our networks into the future and optimized expenditure in condition up based on the investment we have available to us.

Ross:   Correct. And David, just in terms of very simply the structure, we have our public works engineers, have a charitable company, with the board and then a commercial delivery owned, do you want to explain on that at all?

David:  Ross, I think you’ve summed it up pretty well. We are owned by the industry and we’re for the industry. Any returns we can make or small margins, I guess is the right in terms of money, we put back into the development. We’re a charitable company and it’s great to be a part of an enterprise like this.

Ross:   And Theuns, this project, back in the late 90s when it’s started off was sufficiently exciting and revolutionary at that time that my understanding it got you here to New Zealand from South Africa?

Theuns: That’s right Ross. I got involved in the original implementation in 1998. A temporary project that became permanent later on. So I never left New Zealand after that.

Ross:   It’s very good. So, in terms of the videos, we’re going to have a series of nine videos from here. We will just unpack a little bit of the really great gains we had as an industry with the IDS project here in New Zealand.

There’s been some weaknesses with the model on what we’ve been doing. We’re going to be open about that so that you can learn from our experience. And we’re also going to look at just whether the model that we’ve developed here in New Zealand, which we think is quite innovative, could be applied in the area where you are.

So thanks very much for watching the videos and we look forward to seeing you on the next one.