Maximizing capital resources is paramount for Southeast Michigan’s SMART Bus. SMART relies on transit property taxes from communities that opt into its services to fund the agency and services. SMART needed a data-driven system to monitor asset health and prioritize capital projects to ensure every dollar is spent replacing the most critical transit infrastructure. The Trapeze EAM State of Good Repair module streamlines workflows and provides SMART’s capital planners with real-time asset insights they can share with decision-makers.
The Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation (SMART) serves nearly 11 million riders annually with fixed route, paratransit, and community transit services to Macomb, Oakland, and Wayne counties in Southeast Michigan. Supported primarily by a voter-funded property tax (supplemented by federal and state grants), the agency continually evaluates their service to stay on top of changing passenger demands, ensuring routes effectively connect the communities that opt into its transit system. Careful capital planning within the agency’s 10-year outlook and optimized asset management ensure the agency has the right resources to deliver on its service roadmap—including more zero-emission buses and new Park and Ride facilities.
Every year, SMART’s asset managers evaluate which vehicles, equipment, and facilities to replace first based on available funding. With asset condition data residing in spreadsheets it was impossible to get a quick, accurate snapshot of what’s going on across the agency. SMART had to spend considerable time consolidating and manipulating data across multiple spreadsheets to even begin analyzing the data to identify potential capital projects.
This over-reliance on spreadsheet made annual regulatory reporting to the National Transit Database (NTD) a slow, error-prone process. “It was an intense, time-consuming effort,” said Ian Holme, Manager of Transit Asset Management at SMART.
Without a proper asset management system, communication between stakeholders required constant back and forth. “Staff members would call me up and say, ‘Hey, I need information on how many 23-foot buses are beyond their useful life and must be replaced soon.’ And I would say, ‘Let me get back to you. I need to look them up, filter out data, and do the analysis.’” Response times to simple queries like this could take weeks.
“Now, when people call me up to talk about our 10-year capital plan, I can immediately look up the information in Trapeze EAM instead of getting back to them—and I’ve even got graphic visuals to share.”
Ian Holme, Manager of Transit Asset Management, SMART
Today SMART capital planners utilize the EAM State of Good Repair/Capital Planning module (SGR) to manage the agency’s data-driven Transit Asset Management (TAM) program. With Trapeze SGR, SMART has a “single source of truth” to manage each capital asset’s:
And other critical asset and maintenance data. Using the Asset Performance Assessment screen, Ian can quickly coordinate capital planning and project prioritization across the agency. This screen summarizes key SGR metrics in a single view, including “percent of remaining useful life” (by age and mileage)—a calculation that previously took the SMART team hours to calculate manually.
From there, Ian can hyperlink into an individual asset’s details to see its current condition score and even graph its rate of deterioration compared to the industry standard age-decay curves (as provided by the U.S. Federal Transit Administration).
Trapeze SGR highlights and summarizes which assets are getting closest to the end of their useful life so with only a few clicks SMART capital planners can easily select the assets to associate with a capital project. The capital planning screen allows planners to scope out the project, including phases, budget, goals, and risks. Trapeze SGR facilitates capital project scoring, making it easier to make transparent, agency-wide decisions about which projects to fund.
By streamlining TAM workflows into a single capital asset “system of record,” Trapeze SGR created “a better way to operate” for Ian’s team.
Having asset data in one place improved collaboration and productivity across the entire team, delivering real-time results in a short period of time. With a few clicks, SMART can identify poorly performing assets and expedite rehabilitation/replacement decisions. “Staff members from both vehicles and facilities are putting in their own capital projects and creating budgets tied to that,” said Ian. With access to a common set of master data, the staff are more empowered, resulting in a greatly enhanced capital problem-solving and decision-making.
With Trapeze SGR, SMART’s productivity has shot up by 75 to 80%, cutting manual and repetitive processes by up to eight hours a day. The capital plan page automatically generates pie charts and bar graphs that previously took Ian eight hours to generate manually in a spreadsheet. “Now, when people call me up to talk about our 10-year capital plan, I can immediately look up the information in Trapeze EAM instead of getting back to them—and I’ve even got graphic visuals to share.”
The State of Good Repair and Capital Planning module has helped SMART make steady progress toward achieving its goal of being below 25% of assets beyond useful life benchmarking. “It just makes my job easier,” said Ian. “I can now focus the time I used to dedicate to creating those visual aids to other more important things that get us to the decision-making process quicker for our capital projects.”
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