TAMRMS#: B06
6.1
REQUEST FOR DECISION
title
Enterprise Maintenance Management - Asset Management Project Update and Budget Request **TIME SPECIFIC - immediately following agenda item 5.1**
Presented by: Dawny George, Director, Engineering, Jordan Betteridge, Manager, Asset Management, Land & Integrated Infrastructure Services, Lorraine Doblanko, Senior Asset Management Specialist and Joanne Graham, Director, Information Technology
label
RECOMMENDED MOTION(S)
recommendation
That Standing Committee of the Whole recommend to Council that the revised Capital Charter, Enterprise Maintenance Management & Asset Management (EMM-AM) (ITSV-014) as attached to the agenda report entitled “Enterprise Maintenance Management Asset Management Update and Budget Request” dated May 13, 2025, be approved with an increase in budget from $1,400,000 to $6,508,400, with the increase of $5,108,400 to be funded from the Capital Reserve.
body
SUMMARY
This report presents a brief update to the Asset Management Program and the Enterprise Maintenance Management-Asset Management (EMM-AM) project and a request to increase the budget to deliver the intended implementation scope. As the project progressed through its procurement phase, negotiations with the preferred proponent indicate the need for additional funding to complete the project as originally planned.
ALIGNMENT TO COUNCIL DIRECTION OR MANDATORY STATUTORY PROVISION
The EMM-AM project aligns with the Council Strategic Priority of Financial Sustainability. Having a comprehensive and accurate view of all City assets and effectively and efficiently maintaining those assets is a vital step to determine future requirements, accurately manage life cycles, and mature the City’s Asset Management Program while continuing to ensure efficiency in City service delivery with focus on long-term financial sustainability and future growth of St. Albert.
The EMM-AM project is also related to Council Policy, C-P&E-07 Asset Management.
On December 20, 2021, Council passed the following motion to approve the 10 Year Municipal Growth Capital Plan which included the capital growth charter for ITSV-014 Enterprise Maintenance Management & Asset Management (EMM-AM).
AR-21-522:
“That the 2022 Consolidated Municipal and Utility Budget in the amount of $301,883,300 and the Net Tax Requirement of $117,432,700 as shown in the attachment titled "2022 Consolidated Budget" be approved.
That the 10 Year Municipal Growth Capital Plan provided as attachment titled "10 Year Municipal Capital Plan" be approved.
That the 10 Year Utility Growth Capital Plan provided as attachment titled "10 Year Utility Capital Plan" be approved.”
BACKGROUND AND DISCUSSION
St. Albert owns and operates 29 asset portfolios, such as roads, utilities, parks, fleet, equipment, and buildings. The total value of our existing assets is $1.36B according to the latest Tangible Capital Asset (TCA) financial statements. Notably, this is the amortized value of the assets, meaning it is the original purchase price less depreciation. If the City had to replace all the current assets in today’s market value, it would well exceed that amount.
A risk facing municipalities in Alberta is infrastructure deficit. In 2024, ABMunis prepared an article stating that Alberta is facing a $30B infrastructure deficit. There is ongoing pressure to balance investment into infrastructure that supports growth and the requirement to renew and replace existing assets.
Asset management is the process of optimizing the value of those assets through the balance of risk, cost, and performance. Asset management and maintenance management systems are based on common sense and proven processes that provide various benefits to the organization such as:
- Managing risk by evaluating the high consequential assets
- Ensuring consistent and reliable service levels are delivered to residents
- Providing defendable data-driven decisions for capital spending
- Optimizing efficiency and cost effectiveness of operational asset maintenance
- Strengthening resilience by ensuring proactive and prioritized asset maintenance with an integrated asset management outlook.
Asset management is a path towards transparency and accountability to residents and businesses in the community. It will equip operational departments to effectively maintain municipal assets to support the service levels they deliver. It will result in improved customer satisfaction, as there would be fewer unplanned disruptions, higher trust in how tax dollars are spent, and improved communications as data would be available to support messaging.
Asset management is increasingly mandatory within the municipal framework. Provincial and Federal grants have recently begun adding asset management as a weighting within their evaluation criteria. Other jurisdictions such as Ontario have already made asset management a mandatory requirement for their municipalities.
With efficient planning, asset management provides the ability to forecast which mitigates the risk of infrastructure deficit for St. Albert. It will identify expected infrastructure renewal needs and costs which can be used to invest in sufficient reserves. It allows for more accurate financial planning and data driven decision making to optimize maintenance and renewal expenditures by making sure the right decisions are made at the right time.
The City’s asset management program is being matured in alignment with the Asset Management Policy C-P&E-07 as well as best practices including ISO 55000, a globally recognized standard for asset management including the following:
- An asset management framework was developed to outline “how” asset management will be incorporated interdepartmentally and to describe, at a high level, the processes to make up the asset management system.
- A Gap Analysis and Maturity Assessment was conducted organizationally-wide to determine potential constraints and challenges, identifying how departments were currently managing their assets and what improvements would be required to advance them to the necessary maturity states.
Through this analysis, a common issue identified among most departments was the lack of a suitable software system capable of performing the tasks needed to manage the diverse nature and scale of assets across the organization at an enterprise level. Overall, conducting asset management requires:
- Ability to maintain a detailed asset registry listing all assets, types, locations, age, condition, and replacement values.
- Ability to track maintenance records, inspection reports, performance, and condition of all assets, and to classify asset conditions.
- Identification of assets on criticality to service delivery and consequence of failure.
- Ability to analyze maintenance treatment options and run scenarios to optimize budget allocation for maintenance, renewals, and replacements.
These tasks get extremely complicated as City asset stewards manage thousands of individual assets worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Currently, departments have varying levels of asset management maturity, so are facing barriers due to insufficient software tools or siloed specialized software specific to only certain asset classes. Based on the maturity assessments to each asset group, software was ranked as one of the top priorities and this limitation is currently impacting their ability to mature their asset management program.
Given the size, scope, and complexity of the entire portfolio of St. Albert’s assets, a functional, centralized, software system is required to support every department and every asset class. The software needs to be scalable to grow with the City and have the right functionality to serve the various types of assets.
In 2019, Administration conducted an Invitation to Tender (ITT) for a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS). This ITT was cancelled due to the financial and staff time demands posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the ITT process, it was also learned that additional funding would be required to address the enterprise scope for maintenance management and asset management that was needed.
In 2022, the growth capital project charter ITSV-014 Enterprise Maintenance Management-Asset Management was added to the City’s Capital Growth program. Although the budget estimate in the charter was based on the information available at the time, it was noted that a fair and open procurement process was needed to determine the actual budget requirement. Through extensive market research conducted through a Request for Information (RFI) and engagement with all asset stakeholders, the scope and requirements of the Request for Proposal (RFP) issued in October 2023 included all asset classes, and all maintenance management and asset management processes for the City as well as real time integrations to enterprise geographic information, finance and human resource systems. This holistic approach and fully integrated platform are required to execute the City’s asset management program.
Project Budget:
Project Charter ITSV-014 for the EMM-AM platform was previously approved and currently allows for a total project budget of $1.4M. A total of $570K of the $1.4M budget has been expended to date for resources to conduct the above tasks, leaving $830K to complete the implementation.
Administration conducted a rigorous and thorough multi-stage RFP evaluation, negotiation and planning process throughout 2024 and the first quarter of 2025 that identified the scope, implementation plan, pricing, and resource requirements for the project. This capital budget increase is driven by costs determined through these activities and in negotiation with the preferred proponent from the RFP process and represents current market conditions and staffing capacity needs.
STAKEHOLDER COMMUNICATIONS OR ENGAGEMENT
All City departments that have asset ownership were consulted in developing the functional requirements which then led to the RFI and RFP process. Through the multi-step process employed in the RFP process, all asset owners were involved in evaluating the various vendor solutions demonstrated, which then resulted in narrowing down to the preferred vendor for the proposed solution.
IMPACTS OF RECOMMENDATION(S)
Financial:
If the $5,108,400 budget increase is approved, the total project budget for the EMM-AM project will increase from $1,401,000 to $6,508,400 to be funded from the Capital Reserve, which has sufficient funds. While initial funding would be from the Capital Reserve, Administration would explore other funding opportunities.
The EMM-AM implementation cost is expected to be 0.48% of the reported total value of existing Tangible Capital Assets (TCA) of $1.36B
Compliance & Legal:
None at this time.
Program or Service:
The implementation of the EMM-AM platform will give a holistic view of complete asset lifecycle management including planning, procurement, operations, maintenance, and disposal of assets. It will enable the City to fulfill its obligations of delivering and supporting services to the community through asset maintenance and management in a way that balances service delivery, performance, risk and affordability. In other words, it would enable the City to produce a well-integrated and thought-out repair-maintenance-replacement (RMR) capital plan.
This funding increase is required to implement the EMM-AM platform which is needed to execute the City’s Asset Management program.
Organizational:
The EMM-AM platform has an enterprise level scope in both technology and organizational involvement and therefore it will be transformational.
It will provide the technology needed for effective and efficient maintenance management and asset management for all of the City’s 29 asset classes. These asset classes are maintained and managed by the following five City departments:
- Emergency Service
- Community Services
- Public Operations (including Public Works, Utilities, Facility Services, Fleet Services, and Transit)
- Recreation and Parks
- Engineering Services
The platform also provides integration with geographic information, finance and human resource systems affecting the processes within these three City departments.
- Financial and Strategic Services
- Human Resources and Safety
- Information Technology
In addition, the Legal, Legislative, & Records Services department is expected to be involved in streamlining any requirement of Records and Information Management (RIM) branch to EMM-AM data management and records to avoid any duplication of such efforts in the future.
The implementation of the EMM-AM platform will be transformative in improving operational efficiency, asset stewardship, and service delivery. Therefore, it is intended to be implemented in four stages over the next five to six years and will replace the existing service request portal with an integrated public and internal facing portal. In addition, City’s RIM requirements will be incorporated as much as the internal resourcing allows within the staged implementation plan. The implementation stages are as follows.
Stage 1 - Transportation, streets and sidewalk, solid waste, PW inventory, parks and usage areas, trees and horticulture, capital asset planning and service request portal (internally for staff and externally for the public).
Stage 2 - PW fleet and equipment, PW fleet inventory
Stage 3 - Utilities (water, wastewater and storm), utilities facilities
Stage 4 - Municipal and recreational facilities, transit fleet, arts and artifacts.
The rationale behind this staging is to have a successful adoption of this resource intensive implementation plan, starting with transportation and parks assets who are understood to be early adopters, to reduce the time that Public Operations teams will be working with the current maintenance management system, and to retire existing software applications as soon as possible. To take full advantage of the enterprise level asset management functionality, to realize operational efficiencies, and to mitigate risks, all City assets must be integrated to the new EMM-AM system.
Risks
As the City continues to grow, it becomes increasingly important to optimize the activities related to the management of assets. In the current state, departments often rely on fragmented data sources, such as spreadsheets, to track asset conditions, schedule maintenance, and document asset use, leading to increased costs from inefficient and potentially duplicated efforts.
The consolidation of asset information will increase the potential for real-time asset data that will assist in making informed decisions. Incomplete or outdated data negatively affects the ability to make informed decisions related to asset management.
The consolidated nature of the asset information will provide greater clarity and transparency on asset conditions leading to more proactive and informed asset maintenance and decision making rather than being reactive to deteriorating asset conditions or service disruptions.
The platform will provide the ability to work towards a single data set in areas such as labour reporting, work order creation and tracking, and condition rankings. These are just some examples of existing activities that work in isolation from one another and can lead to error and inefficient reporting.
ALIGNMENT TO PRIORITIES IN COUNCIL’S STRATEGIC PLAN
The EMM-AM project aligns with Council Strategic Priority of Financial Sustainability, specifically with regard to the initiative to “implement centralized asset management” under the strategy “to continue to ensure efficiency in City service delivery and operation with a focus on long term financial sustainability.”
Initiative aligned with Strategic Plan:
Mature Asset Management Program
The EMM-AM Platform is also an initiative in the Corporate Business Plan, Digital Transformation priority area under the strategy to “modernize the delivery of programs and services and processes through technology and automation”. The initiative is defined as “replace the current maintenance management system with an integrated enterprise maintenance management and asset management platform”.
It directly supports the Asset Management Program initiative in the Corporate Business Plan, Operational Performance priority area under the strategy to “foster a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, process efficiencies, mature business practices and service optimization”. The initiative is defined as “develop and implement the overall assets management framework, strategy and asset management plans as per Council Policy.”
ALIGNMENT TO LEVELS OF SERVICE DELIVERY
The EMM-AM platform aligns with the following services:
C.1 Environmental Strategy, Risk and Compliance
C.2 Waste Management
C.3 Urban Forestry and Turf Maintenance
C.4 Water, Stormwater and Wastewater Management
E.2 Roadway Repair and Maintenance
G.1 Public Art
G.4 Recreation and Sport Facility Access
G.5 Parks and Open Spaces
H.1 Assets Management
IMPACTS OF ALTERNATIVES CONSIDERED
ALTERNATIVE 1: Cancel the project and do not implement the EMM-AM platform
Financial:
There will be a sunk cost of $570,000 of the already approved $1.4M capital budget. No additional budget will be required. The existing project charter will be closed, and the remaining value of $830,000 will be returned to the respective funding sources for allocation to future Council approved projects.
The current annual investment towards the Repair Maintenance and Replacement (RMR) as a placeholder budget of 1.5% of the tax revenue will continue until a new and refined allocation methodology is adopted. The City’s financial sustainability principles require a re-visiting to ensure the percentage allocation for the RMR budget is sustainable for years to come.
Compliance & Legal:
None at this time.
Program or Service:
With the cancellation of the project, the City’s Asset Management program would be significantly compromised in achieving its continuum of maturity. Without the transformation to centralized and integrated asset data management that enables organization wide asset management intelligence, the analytics towards future asset decisions will be limited at the enterprise level.
Organizational:
With the cancellation of the project, the transformational journey towards effective and efficient maintenance management and asset management for all of the City’s 29 asset classes will be halted.
Departments will continue to rely on fragmented legacy systems which perpetuate inefficiencies, labour-intensive processes and resources, poor data quality, and limited integration with geographic information, finance and human resource systems, hindering matured decision-making and cross-department collaboration.
Risks
Without an increase in funding, the EMM-AM project cannot proceed, and the City’s Asset Management program would be significantly compromised from achieving its desired maturity level.
Failing to implement the integrated EMM-AM platform poses risks to the City’s operational efficiency, service delivery, and long-term financial sustainability.
Remaining with the current mix of siloed software applications would limit the City’s ability to achieve the opportunities identified, inhibit the use of mobile technology and perpetuate labour-intensive processes and resources.
Continued reliance on fragmented legacy systems will lead to inefficiencies, poor data quality, and limited integration with geographic information, finance and human resource systems, hindering decision-making and cross-department collaboration.
Without a centralized system, the City risks having higher maintenance and support costs, reduced asset performance, and missed opportunities to optimize lifecycle value across multiple assets. Inadequate tools for tracking asset conditions, costs, and service levels may compromise risk management, compliance, and strategic alignment with Council priorities.
body
Report Date: May 13, 2025
Author(s): Joanne Graham, Tim Saunders, Dawny George, Jordan Betteridge, Suzanne Findlay
Department: Information Technology, Public Operations, Engineering Services, Finance and Strategic Services
Department Director: Joanne Graham, Tim Saunders, Dawny George, Anne Victoor
Managing Director: Diane McMordie, Dinu Alex, Adryan Slaght
Chief Administrative Officer: William Fletcher