BetterAIM supports our clients in achieving organisational objectives by helping them effectively plan for, deliver, operate, and dispose of assets while ensuring they provide effective service outcomes. Our Asset Management Planning approach focuses on understanding service outcomes, total lifecycle expenditure and organisational risk appetite. These factors help determine the asset planning decisions organisations make and ensure that service, risk and cost levels are appropriately considered across the full asset and project lifecycle.
We blend innovative methodologies with industry practitioner experience and expertise. We help you navigate the complexities of your business environment and ensure your asset management planning practices effectively contribute to your organisational goals.
Our Services
Infrastructure Master planning and Strategy
The delivery of infrastructure master planning and strategy services to clients is becoming increasingly complex across all sectors with increased regulatory, societal and sustainability expectations. This expectation, coupled with escalating costs for the delivery, operations and maintenance of infrastructure, can present major challenges for service providers. One of the most effective ways of understanding these challenges, assessing their impact and communicating results with key stakeholders is the development of effective infrastructure master plans and strategies. These documents must be clear, concise, fact-driven and provide meaningful direction.
BetterAIM support organisations in the delivery of these outcomes through the use of our digital solutions and our people. Our team have worked on major infrastructure strategies and programs across Australia and have helped clients attract state and federal funding and to gain key stakeholder support for proposed infrastructure outcomes.
How do we achieve these outcomes?
- Understanding client needs and objectives and operating environment
- Understanding the services that our clients provide and the assets used to provide services
- Stakeholder engagement activities
- Determining asset risk through assessing asset performance, health and condition, determining asset utilisation and capacity
- Completing infrastructure modelling for the present day and an agreed planning horizon
- Identifying options to achieve suitable outcomes
- Determining high-level lifecycle costs for options
- Completing multi-criteria analysis (MCA) and triple bottom line (TBL) analysis of options weighted by client objectives
- Presenting actionable findings and recommendations to clients
Asset Management Planning / Lifecycle Planning
BetterAIM has transformed Asset Management Plans with our betterAMP solution, an interactive digital asset management planning toolkit to support organisations in understanding the assets they own, the services they provide, and the performance, criticality and risk associated with the assets now and in the future. The product is hosted via a secure Microsoft Azure environment, and users can access Power BI dashboards that help them interact, visualise and analyse their assets.
The betterAMP allows organisations to establish an asset intervention approach based on their risk appetite. This approach forecasts asset investment requirements over your chosen planning horizon (typically 10-20 years). Users can run a series of investment scenarios to understand how asset renewal and capital investment program changes impact their risk profile over time.
The strength of the betterAMP product is that it is organisation-specific, with your data and decision-making approach captured and represented visually. It is accessible and easy to use and allows users to view a range of reporting dashboards configured to suit different organisational requirements. This means that end users have data at their fingertips to help inform decision-making. Finally, betterAMP can be accessed, viewed, understood, and used across an organisation, from field staff to C-Suite executives.
The Asset Management Council has recognised our betterAMP product as revolutionising asset management outcomes. Since 2016, we have provided many betterAMPs for our customers. If your existing Asset Management Plans are not providing the outcomes your organisation needs, we can help!
Water and Sewer Hydraulic Modelling and Developer Contributions
The BetterAIM team has experience in water and sewer hydraulic modelling using various software, including WaterCAD, SewerCAD, Infoworks WS, Infoworks ICM, EPANET and EPA-SWMM. We have provided modelling services for several clients across the country and have a strong understanding of how flows in networks vary between systems, regions and states. We provide modelling support for developing system strategies, front-end planning purposes for projects, operational support, troubleshooting, and assessing the impact of growth/development activities on system performance.
We have experience in applying and using different design and modelling standards and have worked with Water Services Association of Australia (WSAA) guidelines and regional supplements to WSAA, including Melbourne Retail Water Authorities (MRWA), TasWater, Southeast Queensland (SEQ) and Cairns, Townsville, Mackay (CTM) codes. We have also worked with Far North Queensland Regional Organisation of Councils (FNQROC) and Capricornia Municipal Development Guidelines (CMDG) standards to build hydraulic models, assign model parameters (e.g., friction factors, demand patterns, hydraulic loading, etc.) and assess system compliance and performance. Our team have also completed analysis using relevant Australian and Industry Standards for firefighting performance.
We use our data and system integration capability to ensure that the models we develop align with observed system performance and flag areas where design standards vary significantly from system performance. This information helps clients understand operational risk, lifecycle cost, and performance implications.
We can assist clients in creating development servicing plans and have experience using the IPART methodology and Section 64 contribution calculations. We have also worked with clients in other jurisdictions to determine appropriate cost-sharing methods for development activities and apply developer charges for water and sewerage infrastructure.
Operational Support – Infrastructure Resilience, Recovery and Crisis Support
BetterAIM’s team is made up of industry practitioners with significant experience working in utility service-provider organisations. Our team has experience in disaster management and supporting organisations in recovering from crisis events.
We work with organisations to help them understand asset risk based on the consequence of a loss of service and, coupled with this, an understanding of the condition of the asset and its reliability. This practical approach to understanding asset risk helps organisations understand the areas of highest risk and plan accordingly through either mitigating risk (e.g. developing critical spare strategies, documenting system operation/configuration changes) or capturing the risk event as a scenario in a business continuity plan or equivalent document. We focus on management by fact and rapid capture of relevant data to help inform decision-making.
Our team has experience in infrastructure and service recovery post-event and has recently worked with clients in regional Queensland to recover from a major cyclone. Our approach is to provide asset management and engineering support to help reestablish essential services and provide strategies and plans to ensure services remain functional based on organisational constraints. Our experience working across the full asset and project lifecycle for various asset classes means we can help our clients navigate infrastructure service delivery challenges.
Our approach seeks to help clients plan effectively for disaster/crisis events and rapidly recover when one occurs. We can embed team members into client offices and draw on almost 200 years of infrastructure and utility experience across the team.
Portfolio and Program Development, Prioritisation, Forecasting and Pricing
Project Portfolio Management (PPM) helps organisations maximise project contributions to achieving organisational objectives. This is completed by aligning project lifecycle activities such as project identification, prioritisation, planning, approvals, and delivery activities to organisational objectives.
Most organisations are challenged by a desire to deliver more projects than they can afford. BetterAIM works with clients to maximise their return on investment for capital and operational budgets using suitable PPM tools and support.
Effective PPM gives organisations the confidence that they are doing things right:
- The right project (effective prioritisation of risk vs. benefit)
- For the right reasons (project need is demonstrated = prudency)
- Using the right method (project delivery approach minimises lifecycle costs = efficiency)
- At the right time (project timeframes fit for purpose)
- For the right cost (proposed project costs align with expected delivery costs)
Applying the right method helps organisations demonstrate to stakeholders and regulators that their expenditures are prudent and efficient. This is a requirement for price-regulated organisations and represents best practice for organisations operating in an unregulated environment.
BetterAIM has significant experience in helping organisations make the right investment decisions. We can support organisations through practitioner experience, with several of our team having worked in regulated environments and developed price and service plans, pricing responses and portfolios, and program and project justification documentation. Further, our betterAMF and betterAMP tools help organisations easily access and view their asset management information and asset data to support investment decision-making. Our tools also help clients forecast investment requirements over an agreed planning horizon and can be used to support pricing calculations.
Our team has worked with clients to access state and federal funding to support the delivery of projects and work programs through support in business case development, funding applications, and risk assessments.