Demystifying Work Planner Web App

Work Planner™ is Brightly’s newest Strategic Asset Management (SAM) tool, designed to simplify multi-year capital planning and provide greater visibility into all potential outcomes. 

Fully cloud-based, Work Planner sits within the Predictor web app as an optional add-on module – simply upgrade to the web app, click the Work Planner button and Work Planner pops up as an extra tab. 

Let’s explore what Work Planner does and how it can shave hours – if not days – off your capital works planning.  

What challenges does Work Planner help with? 

When planning your next capital projects, it’s important to be able to see a set of logical projects that you can complete in the field over the next few years. But getting to that point is not always an easy task.  

The journey to identifying viable projects involves many people across an organisation. This includes asset managers and works managers across different departments, accountants, GIS analysts, and even people external to your organisation like politicians and community groups. 

 With so many people involved, it’s likely they rely on separate systems to access important data, including differing spreadsheets (sometimes massive ones), asset management systems, GIS to know where work is located, CRMs to collate any requests from the community, and finance systems to understand available funding. 

Teams regularly juggle several different variables as well, like working with multiple funding sources – like grants and levies – on top of the standard capital funding or trying to manage other treatments that need to be slotted into the process.  

Work Planner is a solution that brings everything into one central hub, connecting people, systems, and variables for capital works planning. It enables stakeholders to collaborate effectively and work together to perform all complex tasks in one spot. 

Work Planner doesn't just simplify the planning process; it also facilitates economies of scale for overlapping projects. For example, if you're going out to lay a brand-new footpath, you want to avoid a situation where you must come back a couple of years later to dig it up and replace the drainage underneath. Having visibility across any instances of overlapping work is especially important in carrying out capital works to ensure you are optimising the use of resources and ensuring that every dollar is put to its best use. 

How does Work Planner work? 

Work Planner allows you to take your asset candidates for capital works from Predictor and package those up into Logical Capital projects, while also bringing in projects and works from other areas. Then, it provides that information in a format ready to pass across to your project management system.​ 

It’s the missing puzzle piece that provides users with a collaborative platform to help plan and package asset treatments into logical projects.  

Data from Work Planner can be passed on to any Council-owned project system using easy export or a simple API integration.​ The project management system can then take over and see the capital works through to completion.  

What’s new with the Work Planner web app

Our first version of Work Planner was a plugin for Eri’s GIS software, ArcGIS Pro, and was geared towards packaging capital projects for spatial assets, allowing users to bundle asset treatments by location and time using the spatial tools available within the ArcGIS Pro environment. 

With the newest version, Work Planner is embedded within the Predictor platform web app, enabling users to package works across spatial and non-spatial assets. In other words, works planning can now be based on attributes in addition to location and time.  

There is no corporate GIS required – all the mapping visualisations are embedded directly within the product itself. This makes it easy to provide access to stakeholders. They do not need additional licensing for a GIS-based product or associated training – they can start using the tools immediately through the web app.  

Another reason we developed the web app is because we learnt that many organisations do not have Esri or a corporate GIS system or are not positioned to change their GIS system to use Work Planner. Therefore, we created an app that combined GIS, asset data, Predictor, and work planning in one simple yet powerful platform. 

Final thoughts

If you’re looking for ways to enhance and simplify your capital works planning, Brightly’s Work Planner is the perfect solution. With features that allow you to improve communication among key stakeholders and connect various systems all into a single platform, you can make smarter, data-driven funding decisions to maximize every dollar spent.  

Contact us if you want to learn more about Work Planner.