Leisure groups make light work of asset management with new online tool
17 June 2014
Leisure groups across the UK are discovering a faster more efficient way to manage their huge list of assets - so meet ever tighter maintenance targets and maximise the value of their often huge capital investment.
Asset management - what is still for hundreds of groups a paper based procedure used to report faults and manage maintenance across sites - can now be streamlined in a new, easily accessible on line tool called WAM (Workflow Asset Management). The system was introduced onto the market by Halo Enterprises, the business arm of the award-winning social enterprise Halo Leisure. "We designed the software to improve our own asset management and performance, and it worked so well we decided to create Halo Enterprises to allow us to promote this system to others working in the same industry - and to raise revenue for the work we do at Halo," says Kris Price who heads up this division.
Relaunched last year it is being taken up by an increasing number of leisure groups across the UK, most recently in Scotland where both Live Active and Borders Sport and Leisure have adopted the programme. Like other WAM users, they have simply been able to list their huge database of assets onto the system and programme it to allow for checks and regular maintenance every hour, week, month or whatever is necessary. Faults are reported at the push of a button and the system updates, adding jobs to the schedule, ordering parts and allowing managers to see the progress of repairs.
"We'd been looking for a system that could work across multiple sites and report back sensible information to managers so they could see what work has been done, and what is outstanding," says Dave Thompson, health and safety and estates manager at Live Active. "When people work on shifts the paper based systems aren't always efficient. We'd tried an electronic system on one site but the roll out costs were horrendous. The flexibility of WAM was the attraction, but the price worked too. We are already seeing the difference. Everyone - from the site managers to the Board - are always up to date with work being done."
"WAM has made a significant difference to our business," adds Margaret Morrison from Borders Sport and Leisure. "Instead of the Technical Manager dealing with numerous calls and emails, the team simply log a job on the system and it’s then assigned to the right person. Everyone, whether technical, facility or Head Office staff can log in at anytime and get an update. We have opened the system up to other departments including marketing, who use it to log website issues, and finance who use it to log issues with our business management system."
