Tribal provided their K2 facilities and asset management solution to replace all legacy asset management systems.
The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD) is an outer London Borough to the east of the City on the north bank of the River Thames and within the M25 London Orbital Motorway.
Overall the service provides a full programme and project management service to the Council covering major corporate programmes and all capital projects, as well as offering a complete Corporate Landlord Service to manage the Council’s Property and Facility Assets.
The requirement
London Borough of Barking & Dagenham Council was moving away from Evolution (a Tribal legacy product) and required a new solution that included a two-way interface to Oracle Financials. Following the decision to replace their existing systems the project started in July 2009 with the objective to have all functionality within Evolution, including Condition, live within five months. This included a key expansion programme for the K2 reactive repairs and planned maintenance system to be live before their mainframe system was decommissioned. It was hoped that the reactive and planned maintenance system would be up and running by March 2010.
K2 can run under Citrix and provides compatibility with a whole host of complimentary systems including AutoCAD, MS Office, GIS, Oracle, and MS Windows. K2 is a Smart Client application and is therefore browser independent with the K2 portal utilising the latest browsers.
The implementation of the K2 software involved a number of challenges which had to be overcome efficiently:
- The life of their current property system was about to expire and could not operate on Windows XP which the Council’s IT department had a strategy to upgrade.
- The Council needed the historic property data which had to be migrated from the legacy system into K2.
- Interfaces were required to GIS, CAD, NLPG and their corporate Finance system Oracle.
- As part of the implementation new ways of working had to be introduced to save the Council money and justify the capital expenditure on a new system.
LBBD wanted to maintain 'business as usual’ in order' to provide the best quality of service to the families and business they serve. Tribal were under pressure to meet the tight deadlines set by the Local Authority in order for substantial mainframe costs to be realised and to maintain a seamless service to the public.
The solution
The Council required a system which would be more accessible to council staff. During product demonstration the team could see that K2 was developed in partnership with Microsoft and was both easy to use and intuitive. The procurement team were impressed by the flexibility of the K2 interface which adopts the windows ribbon menu, dockable windows, multi threaded functionality and has been designed with the user experience in mind.
Tribal provided seamless data migration from the Council’s legacy systems to K2. Tribal’s Professional Services team led on the analysis, specification, testing and management of the processes to extract, transform and load data from legacy systems into the K2 system. Data quality and integrity was critical to ensure a smooth transition to the new system, which included all property asset information.
During the course of 2009, LBBD continued to implement additional modules and functionality to build a more complete picture of property performance through intelligent CAD drawings and a GIS interface for spatial awareness. This included the Estates modules that would include its commercial investment portfolio: leases, rent reviews, disposals and valuations. The School Suitability and Sufficiency functionality was also added, followed by the vital interface to Oracle Financials.
The Health and Safety modules have been implemented with the Asbestos module (considered to be the important first stage), replacing the previous system and saving the council money on an annual basis ever since. This will be followed by Generic Audits, Fire, Legionella and Energy. The latter may involve further integration with the Council’s Energy Management System.
K2 is now the lead property system in the Council from which all other systems refer. K2 licensing is based upon concurrent users and the K2 Portal will provide access to information and call logging across the Council and its schools.
Benefits
K2 Facilities and Asset Management has provided the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham with a customisable, easy-to-use, and fully integrated back-office solution, resulting in the realisation of a number of key benefits:
- Provided an up to date and supported technology platform from which to build a corporate system.
- Contributed to significant cost and time savings by replacing mainframe server.
- Replaced in house systems reducing data disparity.
- Replaced products provided by 3rd parties delivering further financial savings.
- In 2011 LBBD formed a central helpdesk which operates K2 for consistency in fault logging and progression.
- Improved data quality and reporting.
“To consolidate our applications and to make efficiency savings we chose K2 as the most suitable solution to integrate all the asset management activities across the Corporate and Education functions within the entire Council. The implementation of the K2 Asset Management System will contribute to making estimated savings of £250k for the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham over the next five years.”
