New Asset Management Solution Increases Engineering Consultancy Effectiveness and Value

Sydney, August 16, 2007 - Engineering consultancies stand to gain significant benefits from a new asset management system designed to measure, monitor, track and rank the risks strategic assets pose to the ongoing operation of an organisation. This follows a partnership between Smartpath, an asset management and software development specialist, and The Middle Way, a specialist sustainability management consultancy.

Smartpath's Loc8 product, in tandem with The Middle Way's ‘Seven Steps' best practice methodology, helps senior executives rationalise line of business assets, ascertain return on investment, allocate maintenance or replacement funding based on the risk assets face, and predict failure points to provide managers with the means to maintain service delivery. Loc8 will also ensure organisations stay within compliance and commercial requirements.

Also available via ‘software-as-a-service', the Loc8 solution has been designed to address the specific needs of engineering consultancies and engineering professionals engaged in delivering asset management services. This includes asset management of entire buildings, their contents, the building fabric and the monitoring of reinforcing corrosion, known as concrete cancer, as well as plant and equipment and infrastructure.

Based on a template-system, Smartpath's Loc8 product provides full asset management functionality and allows engineers to input estimated costs for remedial works or equipment replacement, allocate timeframes and set priorities, to allow more accurate budget projections.  Loc8 also includes a full Help-Desk facility allowing incidents to be tagged to specific assets as well as the normal call logging, ticket escalation and incident resolution capabilities.

Loc8 enables engineers to map assets to physical locations within the Loc8 software and to manage audits by inputting geographical site coordinates or location descriptions, rather than relying on separate spreadsheets. This considerably reduces the chances of missing assets in the physical walk round phase of the audit.

"Our solution facilitates best practice by combining science, economics and technology," said Geoff Noonan, Principal of The Middle Way. "Human intervention in commercial matters doesn't always effect the best decision for the business. This really is about applying a qualitative, subjective process to assets to ensure a quantitative outcome. This is represented in dollar savings, legal compliance and manufacturing and service delivery continuity."

"Managing assets within engineering companies is often a highly complex task. We've worked considerably with The Middle Way to being the two components of product and consultancy together to give customers a structured approach to assessing risk for tangible benefits," said Phil Hare, General Manager, Marketing at Smartpath.

Coupled with powerful reporting and query functions, Smartpath's Loc8 has also been designed to offer affordability and far greater flexibility over existing tools often attached to generic enterprise-wide financial systems.

Loc8 is available under flexible licensing arrangements, which include a managed services provider (MSP) model for Smartpath partners, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model that means Loc8 can be run under an operating expense (opex) model or as a traditional perpetual license.

More information can be found at http://www.smartpath-software.com or by phoning 1300 651 305.