With over 52,000 street lighting assets spread across the county, Cumbria County Council required an efficient and effective system to manage, operate and maintain them accurately. The lighting team lacked a system to view, edit and manage their lighting units effectively, with one of the key requirements being a spatial interface to view their inventory geographically. Mott MacDonald worked with the council to develop a street lighting asset management system, called Brite, a bespoke deployment of Moata Geospatial to aid in the cost-effective management and operation of lighting assets.
During the deployment of Brite, the Moata Geospatial team linked the existing data siloes, creating a system to bring together all lighting asset information. Brite provides an integrated spatial and tabular view of all the street lighting assets across the county, which not only provides full geographical context to their information, but also allows the team to view asset locations and attributes with ease.
The units are managed hierarchically, connecting all associated components of a street lighting unit and allowing them to be viewed and managed as one entity. Assets can be edited individually or in bulk, with modular access rights in place to ensure only those with the correct permissions can edit the data. Pre-defined lookups, which can be edited by certain users, allow attribute information to be updated quickly and easily. Users can also query their data, via spatial and attribute filters, and run reports within the system, enabling a greater understanding of their assets.
Brite has provided the council with a complete street lighting management system. In practice, this has led to huge efficiency savings in locating, updating, and understanding their assets, with a significant reduction in errors due to the provision of transaction tracking and modular access rights. The system has shown the power of connecting siloed datasets and has been used extensively, with over 570,000 transactions recorded since the system was deployed in February 2019, over 50% of which are edits.
Feedback from the lighting team has highlighted the value of the system, with particular reference made to the ease and efficiency of updating units, both individually and in bulk, using the pre-defined lookups. By allowing the team to update these lookups, it has helped ensure an accurate and comprehensive inventory is maintained. The ability to filter, particularly spatially using imported shapefiles, has saved hours of interrogation time, allowing the team to readily find all assets located within a boundary, such as a national park. This has improved the speed and efficiency with which this information can be shared with partner organisations to help support economic growth and community aspirations.
The use of Brite has revolutionised the operation and maintenance of lighting assets, with the Council reporting that it is the first time in over 22 years that they know where all their lighting assets are.
“In over 30 years of experience this is the best lighting asset management system we've ever had.” Lighting Manager, Cumbria County Council.