low hard should you link about software?
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reducing the tyre inventory introducing a city-wide :dure for inventory control. the annual savings, the 'alent of some £50,000 — )er cent of the total operat)udget — was due to the in the size of the fleet and ?Auction in overnight use of :les. In addition, an auto:: fuel dispensing system uced a net saving equivao some £4,000 a year.
e city's municipal garage responsible for maintaining 3,800 items of equipment ing from heavy fire appara:o 201n lawn mowers — a of operation substantially ir than that of British local orities.
avertheless, the savings sed give a general indicaof what can be achieved in invironment which has exanced some neglect.
?arer home, a study carried by the personnel and manTient services department of id County Council calculates better vehicle replacement cies could lead to a reduction Dme five per cent annually in total expenditure of the iority on vehicles and plant. the year 1979/1980, this tld have meant that savings the order of £75,000 per qum could have been ieved. Further savings could gained from improvement in ntenance facilities and in the ianisation and control of
licle maintenance and repair. OGRU has carried out a -iety of studies for local hority transport departments recent years. It has been nd that there is a general ab ice of reliable data on life-toe upkeep costs, which are ?ded for effective replace !lit decisions.
t has been estimated that the 3ilability of this data for the jular review of equipment recement could lead to savings the order of five per cent on uipment purchase and mainlance costs.
To see what savings local thorities might expect, this is a situation of a highways dertment in the medium size unty. The department owns id maintains about 500 hides and spends about £2m mar on vehicles and plant. On e basis of current expenditure, e best estimate of savings is own below: According to LOGRU such an authority "can expect overall savings of around £100,000 per annum — about five per cent of current expenditure — on a fully operational system. In practice, it would be about two to three years before the maximum benefits were achieved, and in some areas the benefits are likely to come more slowly than others.
"Allowing for this, the effective annual savings of the system are liely to be of the orderroder of £50,000 a year."
These savings will be offset by the cost to the authority of ac quiring, mounting and operating the system. The total software charges, at 1980 prices, are £12,000, and the annual maintenance charge is around £800.
On a system with a five-year life, the net extra costs are likely to be of the order of £5,000 per annum with potential benefits of the order of £50,000 per annum.
Staff resources will be about six to nine man months for im plementing the system, together with the equivalent of about one-quarter of a systems analyst's time for day-to-day operations.
On the clerical side, the system carries out tasks which would normally be done manually. This means that, with appropriate training, staff can be transferred from current proce dures to work on the system. If staff can be redeployed in this way additional expenditure on staff will be small — mainly the cost of training and regrading.
Corresponding savings for a typical metropolitan district, with say 250 vehicles, says LOGRU should be around £25,000 per annum and for a smaller district about £10,000 per annum.
"The net benefits, allowing for
implementation costs., will be smaller than for the county: for metropolitan districts, overall savings should be about £20,000 per annum; and for small districts, about £5,000.
"If the system finds widespread support among local authorities in the UK, annual savings, based on 1980 prices, of at least £5m could be expected, in addition to substantial improvements in the quality of vehicle management.
"This should lead to better use of vehicles and materials which accounts for over three-quarters of direct expenditure on vehicle operations."
There are obviously significant differences between the requirements and objectives of an accounting-oriented system and those of a management information system.
There may be a conflict between the two sets of requirements which make it desirable for these examples to store different information about the same real-life event.
The fact that a repair was carried out on overtime should not be allowed to bias the comparison of repair costs between similar items of plant.
When implementing the system, thought must be given to eliminating, as far as possible, any biasing factors arising from the use of conventional accounting procedures. Obviously, some element of compromise is unavoidable — but it is still worth thinking through what options are available.
The exercise has shown that a highways department, using comparatively modest resources, can adapt the Fleet Management System to suit its own requirements.
"One of the main lessons to come out of this project," says the report "is that the successful implementation of the system depends not only on technical skills, but on the capacity of staff from a variety of backgrounds to work together.
"This means, firstly, that senior management and unions must give their full commitment to a joint effort; secondly, that the working group should expect to be involved in teambuilding as well as data gathering; and, finally, that agreements are reached on a realistic time-scale for implementing the system."
The original job of the LGORU then was to take the American IBM Cobald programs, test them and adapt them to local authority requirements. It also needed to convert them to run on ICL machines.
This phase was achieved about 18 months ago and now both IBM and ICL programs ar€ available.
Four major local undertakingE — the London Borough of Bar net, Lambeth and Wandswortf as well as Lincolnshire Count) Council -have taken th( system and are now implement ing it.
There are another six more in terested local authorities in th,
pipeline, and inquiries are corn ing in from both public and pri vate operators.
Northumberland Count Council is going to reintroduc the scheme in the near futur€ and there are plans to develo European interest in the schemE