AssetWorks' John H. Hines, III

With more than 25 years serving the transit market place, and more than 80 customers focused on public transportation, AssetWorks’ staff has firsthand experience with the trends that drive customer deployment of technology. Over the past year, our customers have communicated two main issues: the need for a tighter integration between maintenance and operations, and the need for better ways to control and reduce fuel expenditures.

Operations and Maintenance Information Integration
As public transportation moves from reactive to proactive maintenance systems, managers want systems that are both robust enough to track and analyze all aspects of the operation and simple enough to ensure data is entered timely and correctly. In many cases, these managers are using multiple software and hardware systems to meet their needs. Managing all these systems is not easy; nor always efficient or accurate.

We see a growing trend toward tightly integrated operations and maintenance systems that enable data to flow freely and allow users to get access to that same consistent data no matter which business system they are working in. Managers that work with well-integrated systems are better able to analyze and interpret the data effectively than with stand-alone systems. The easier the data is to access, the quicker that data can be used by management for short- and long-term planning.

We’re hoping to help make that a reality for operations and maintenance information sooner than you think. Recently MAXIMUS Asset Solutions became AssetWorks when it became part of the Trapeze Group of companies. Our new home enables us to be in the unique position to provide new opportunities to our customers that join operations and maintenance information as never before.

Whether it is sending current fleet availability from AssetWorks to Trapeze operations in real time or pulling odometer updates and maintenance trouble tickets from Trapeze ITS systems into AssetWorks, the value in end-to-end integration is an exciting new development.

Look for our development teams to release new features in both applications to help further strengthen the integration of maintenance and operations information in the very near future...

Integration of Automated Fueling Systems
Fuel continues to be a larger share of the cost for a transit organization. The best way to find cost reductions is with the proper tracking of overall fuel consumption and consumption for individual vehicles. Fuel can be treated as a key inventory item with real-time integration between your automated fueling system and your maintenance management application. By incorporating an automated odometer reading, your fuel system can assist with preventive maintenance compliance via accurate meter reads. The value of this is apparent by the increasing number of organizations that have acted on this realization; each has demonstrated significant operational efficiencies by leveraging this touch point.

AssetWorks is the only fleet asset management software provider to also provide a real-time (networked) automated fueling system (AFS). AssetWorks FleetFocus is the software that controls our FuelFocus AFS, on one database, in real time.

Summary
As our transit and commuter rail customers continue to expand their use of technology to manage physical assets, they push us to deliver our applications in the way they want to use them. Through our focus on ease-of-use and best-of-breed functionality, new integration capabilities to and from Trapeze products, and delivering an integrated automated fueling system, we continue to stay in front of our customer’s expectations.

Biography
Mr. Hines has more than 30 years experience in asset maintenance management software, having taken asset management software from mainframe to the Web, and paper on the shop to touch screens and wireless mobile technology.