As IPWEA’s Roads Yardstick Program enters its second year, the man behind the program, Morrison Low Director Dan Bonifant, discusses the benefits councils can reap from the program and what’s new for 2015.
Q. What is the Roads Yardstick Benchmarking Survey/Report?
A. It’s a tool for benchmarking a range of aspects of the management and operations of Council’s largest asset group, roads. Once the survey and audits are complete, participants gain access to a comprehensive data set of meaningful benchmarks. We provide a short summary report with the key findings of the survey. More importantly, participants can access more than 200 tables, and charts online so they can conduct their own interrogations and comparisons.
Q. What do participants have to do to take part?
A. Councils must complete an online survey where they provide data regarding their road network, including basic information about the various asset groups, financial information, condition, and answer questions about service delivery. It usually takes councils a day to complete the survey the first time. This is followed by an onsite audit by one of our asset management consultants which usually takes about half a day.
Q. What is benchmarked by the program?
A. The benchmarks are grouped into categories around Provision, Investment, Operations, Infrastructure Management and Environmental Sustainability. The program covers all assets within the road corridor including roads, footpath, kerb and gutter, urban drainage and traffic facilities. This provides comparisons about how much money is invested in roads on maintenance, renewal and operations on a per kilometre or population basis.
We also benchmark operational aspects such as how functions are delivered (whether internally or externally) and the condition of the assets. This helps councils understand who they should be comparing themselves to, and over time, they are able to benchmark themselves against others to see the historical trend. While there is not enough consistency around service levels to compare these, we are in effect benchmarking service levels; condition, affordability and quantity.
Q. How did the Roads Yardstick Program begin?
A. It was a joint initiative between ourselves [Morrison Low], Xyst and the IPWEA who were looking to provide some objective information that councils could use for things like informing the develop of asset management plans. We involved a small group of nine councils in a pilot program where we came up with a series of useful benchmarking tools that would help councils manage their roads.
Q. Who is the program aimed at?
A. It’s aimed at two levels. The Director or General Manager get the headline information that allows them to see quickly how their council compares to others and ask the question ‘Why?” if their council seems out of step - we recognise that there may well be very good reasons why.
The second level is the Asset Managers who are more likely to drill down into the data using the online reporting tools to look at more detailed differences and talk to the relevant member(s) of the program. All data carries the council name for that very reason. There is no anonymous data so everyone can see who is the leading council on a particular benchmark.
Q. What were the key trends in this year’s report?
A. We were surprised by the large variances between important financials, such as the valuation and depreciation between similar councils. We would have thought there would be a much closer correlation between councils.
Q. What is new for 2015?
A. We’ve introduced benchmarks around response times (another service level) and also around plant and equipment, particularly for the rural councils where benchmarks around heavy plant will be a useful tool. The program is expanding too, which is great as this year as we’ve had more interest from councils in Victoria.
We also plan to hold more online webinars this year as they are a great way to communicate with the whole group or smaller more focussed groups. We plan to have one prior to the audits, once data collection has been completed, to prepare everyone for the audits. Then we’ll hold another one early in 2016 on the online reporting to ensure councils are making best use of the information available to them.
Q. When does the next program start and how can people get involved?
A. The 2015 program gets underway shortly with data collection starting in early September and councils have until the early October to complete the survey before the auditing period begins.
Note also that IPWEA is about to launch a new Practice Note on Condition Assessment for road pavements for sealed and unsealed roads that will further assist Councils inputting data on road condition into the yardstick program.