SmartAsset Goes Art Deco

You may recall from the Kiwi Travelogue of our last newsletter that SmartAsset was destined to be implemented for the Port of Napier.
After several months of data preparation and two torrid weeks of uploading, testing, training and implementing, we are delighted to announce that SmartAsset is alive and well at the Port for the city that boasts some of the greatest examples of Art Deco architecture. The result of it being re-built after an earthquake levelled the place on February 3, 1931.

While the maintenance workshops and port facilities are functional rather than arty, they now play home to numerous PCs loaded with the Outlook Addin of SmartAsset to enable maintenance planning using calendars that are shared via MS Exchange, so that those needing to know can see the planned workload by major asset groupings. For the Port, these consist of mobile cranes, forklifts, wharves, vehicles, buildings and related services.

The Port is also the first SmartAsset customer to roll-out the Browser-deployed Job Request module enabling operations staff to report faults. The workshop planners receive these requests as emails and are able to raise and assign resultant jobs without leaving Outlook. Even the originator of the request gets an automatic email confirming this assignment and subsequent notification of job completion.

Training was conducted in the salubrious surroundings of the Port’s Board Room and consisted of a full-day planners training for 6, 2 half-days for training 12 job executors and 4 1-hour sessions for a total of 20 job requestors.

Production data copied to a test database was used for the training. It comprised 4893 assets, 115 standard activities linked to 576 assets and 353 catalogue items.

The Port runs Dynamics GP for its financials and a real-time interface was delivered such that cost codes, supplier codes and CAPEX codes are validated directly against the GP database from SmartAsset. Purchase orders and subsequent receipts are posted back from GP to SmartAsset as material/resource costs and the costs of plant and labour as recorded via job resource feedback and timesheets (both entered via the SmartAsset Outlook addin) find their way back to GP as charges to the related Asset and material/labour recovery accounts.

While the two-week visit to Napier consisted mostly of hard work, this was somewhat tempered by the surroundings.

The walk to work of a morning was along a stretch of beach that has been enhanced with gardens (including a sunken one), a sound-shell, conference centre, skate park, aquarium and eateries.

For those of you that like to spoil a good walk by hitting (and sometimes missing in my case!) a little white ball, the region boasts a golf course that is rated 27th best in the world. The Cape Kidnappers course is a short drive south of Napier and includes some fairways that drop away to the ocean. While there was insufficient time to play a game, just visiting the place has inspired this author to plan a game there at some future date. Maybe the Port will one day play host to a SmartAsset user conference?