Success Stories
Hunter Water plugs drain on funds
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CONSULTANCY Hunter Water Australia has turned from whiteboards to software to help assess the risks involved in managing the tens of billions of dollars worth of physical assets owned by water industry clients.
Consulting on the asset management activities of water and wastewater utilities involves downloading enormous amounts of technical data.
Newcastle-based HWA would traditionally use whiteboards to glean technical input for risk assessment.
The company does much of its management consulting work in the US and Canada.
"If you could imagine putting a spreadsheet on a wall and gradually filling out the cells -- it is not exactly the most exciting event," HWA general manager Jim Keary says.
"People relate to seeing things form before their eyes."
It was in the US that Keary first came across the knowledge gathering tool MindManager.
"Most of the applications here are in the education area to run meetings.
"Not many people are using it for technical applications and that is what is different about what we do with it."
HWA began using Mindjet's MindManager software about four years ago to systematically present information gathered from customers' engineers, operators and other experts.
HWA, a subsidiary of Hunter Water Corp, has contracts to run 25 treatment plants in the Hunter region of NSW and is involved in supporting the operation of about 25 plants elsewhere in Australia.
The company, which has 160 staff, also operates an environmental testing laboratory.
Its operational background provides a platform to offer answers to a range of water and wastewater issues.
"We consult on asset management activities of water and wastewater utilities," Mr Keary said. "We have set up management systems that help run their enterprises and in doing so they have become more efficient and saved a lot of money."
HWA has created a range of novel tools for the asset management field. The company leads the world in assessing the failure risk of water industry assets in dollar terms.
"We have developed an actuarial approach to assess the risks associated with all the physical assets and to maintain and replace them in the best way because of that assessment," Mr Keary said.
The assessment process involves a complex range of geographical information system, spreadsheet and other applications to build a series of elaborate models, including critical input from customers and other industry experts accessed through MindManager.
Clients see their information being built up and ultimately transformed into strategies, Mr Keary said.
"The beauty of MindManager is that it is a pretty simple tool to understand and people see all of their information on the screen -- so it is a co-operative downloading effort." Mr Keary said the MindManager software interacted with people in a visual way and was economical, at just $300 to download.
"While you can do these things on Word or Excel they are ugly interaction tools."
The MindManager system also allows users to download the knowledge into other applications such as Word or Excel. HWA is using MindManager 8, the latest version.
Mr Keary said MindManager was a high-level presentation tool that could enhance interaction with a group.
"It is a highly interactive visual tool that is cheap and easy to use and in some organisations there is very broad acceptance of it and it does save time."
Mr Keary is working on projects with Mindjet specialists in San Francisco to automate the process of accessing technical information.
CASE STUDY : HWA
The problem: The company needed a highly interactive visual
tool to help staff understand large amounts of technical data.
The process: It installed US-developed MindManager software
from Mindjet.
The result: It has a tool that delivers high-level
presentations and enhances group interactions.
