Ultimo Software Solutions
EAM/ADP Project at Gatwick Airport
Implementation of the Ultimo enterprise asset management system at Gatwick took the honours not just in the Maintenance Project of the Year.
It also wins the overall M&E Excellence Award, as the project that, in the view of the editor, was the most deserving of a special accolade on the basis of innovation, productivity or potential impact across industry.
Implementation of the EAM was part of a greater project – the Asset Data Platform, or ADP Project. Gatwick’s existing EAM solution had been in use for a very long time. Asset data was undermined by duplication and unreliable input. It was difficult to trust trend analysis produced from the data, and nearly impossible to generate reports to help Gatwick to improve its maintenance activities.
The ADP programme, for which independent consultant Oliver Kane acted as Programme Manager on behalf of Gatwick Airport, was not just an IT project. It was a business transformation programme intended to help Gatwick to manage and maintain all the assets in its £2.3bn asset base for their entire life. It will enable the airport to initiate, plan, design, build, commission, maintain and decommission assets.
implementation of the ADP project took 18 months from detailed design to going live. The purpose was to create a platform that can be built on for the next five to ten years. An important aspect was improving data integrity. At the start of data cleansing there were about 2,000 locations and 120,000 equipment records in the system. After the clean-up, there are 12,000 locations and 80,000 equipment records. A clean-up of preventive maintenance routines reduced the number from 20,000 to 14,000 and quality has been improved.
The project was successful and was managed within budget. Before going live a pilot took place, which was so successful that the technicians didn’t want to go back to the old system. Improvements were felt within a few weeks of going live. Administration time has been reduced freeing more time to be spent on improving asset management.
The Ultimo software, especially the mobile app Ultimo Go, provides technicians with a readily accessible interface, with real-time information retrieval. Prior to this it took several days to retrieve information from the original business systems.
Technicians say that the system is quick and intuitive; users have embraced it and collaboration between technicians is said to have improved.
Compared with the original system, data was 40% accurate and is now at 90% . There is better integration of maintenance and engineering, and Ultimo is helping with compliance with the ISO55001 standard, which had been an area of concern previously. M&E editor David Fowler said: “This ambitious and far-reaching project was designed to transform Gatwick Airport’s management of its entire £2.3bn asset base. It was completed within budget and has been enthusiastically adopted by staff. It was unanimously praised by the judges in its category and is a worthy winner of this year’s M&E Excellence Award.”
