Cardiff County Council is always admirably committed to improving the quality of life for people and communities, both locally and as the capital city of Wales.

Cardiff County Council is responsible for managing and reviewing their assets; both property and infrastructure. The National Assembly for Wales (NAW) Working Party issued guidance to Local Authorities in 2001 for the development of an Asset Management Plan (AMP). The guidance required Local Authorities to implement Asset Management Plans for property and infrastructure by April 2004, including housing by April 2006. The objective of the AMPs was to achieve a more efficient and effective use of the council's assets.

PROBLEM

Cardiff's previous surveys database was written in Access and linked to a MapInfo table. Cardiff County Council did not only want to meet the AMP requirements, they also wanted to develop links to their core database, increase the availability to more users and make the system more robust and secure.

The Council was also looking for ability to:

• Prioritise and set maintenance programs
• Predict patterns of future maintenance
• Help identify inefficient assets
• Ensure a better return on investment

SOLUTION

Aligned Assets was approached by Cardiff and proposed a SQL surveys solution, which Cardiff chose to adopt. The fundamentals of the project were focused on condition, fitness for purpose and to meet objectives.

The SQL surveys database project created Cardiff's first specialised AMP database application. It provides a repository for all of Cardiff's Asset Management Planning information. The software incorporates a number of modules, which combines all the functionality required for a Local Authority to manage and report on their property portfolio.

Various forms allow the entry of budgetary and actual expenditure, and recording the results of surveys such as suitability, condition or asbestos studies. The application has the bespoke reporting engine and the spatial tables can be accessed via any MapInfo mapping product. The application is also integrated into EMS, Cardiff's Estate Management System.

The use of Spatialware for SQL Server was found to be the best option, as it offered a number of benefits to Cardiff. The solution offered a tightly integrated database, which offered the opportunity for spatial data to be managed and edited by multiple users concurrently, and with such an integrated database the software became available for use in other projects.

The system presently works with the 'Consortium of Local Authorities in Wales' (CLAW), which provides an opportunity for benchmarking. Cardiff had the capability to work on a number of performance indicators, such as property asset management, energy, building maintenance and estate and land management, and then evaluate their own performance against that of other Local Authorities in Wales.