L&T IDPL has one of the largest project portfolios in India’s road sector, comprising approximately 9200 lane km spread across 19 road projects pan India. Their road project portfolio includes high-traffic corridors connecting key industrial cities and ports in India. Their asset comprises of highways, toll plazas, sign boards, signals, major and minor bridges, drainages, avenue plantations, median plantations, maintenance vehicles, transformers, diesel generators, urban landscape, UPS & related road assets.
Their clients - NHAI & State Highway Authorities have very stringent norms on SLA violations and inspection requirements with huge financial impact. Given the expanse of their portfolio, it was very difficult to monitor the assets and their maintenance. And these assets need to be monitored and maintained for the entire concession period of 20-25 years.
Each Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) have their own way of maintaining the same. However, it was difficult to monitor them from the corporate Office –Operations & Maintenance. It was not possible to do any benchmark study, improve the efficiency, productivity and performance and compare and adopt best practices from other projects.
Since all the information is captured and maintained manually, reporting becomes cumbersome and time-consuming for preparing various analytical reporting requirements of management and clients. The business team required an application which would resolve all these issues and standardize the process across all the SPVs, while improving productivity and efficiency of these assets.
The implementation
They developed a mobile application called High Maintenance System (HMS) to enhance all the civil maintenance where engineers capture information on the spot. The app would work in online/offline mode and the data would synchronize once it is connected to a network.
‘The application offers the actual calendar functionality to the engineers with to-do-list on daily/weekly and monthly basis. It eases the maintenance engineer’s work by providing preplanned inspection schedule, preventive maintenance calendar, provides timely alert on SLAs thereby enhancing efficiency,’ says M Sivasubramanian, Head IT, L&T.
The system has various analytical and management reporting system which allow them to retrieve all records in a click of the button.
High Maintenance System is one of its kind in the infrastructure industry and there is no readymade product available in the market to these requirements. This helps in maintaining the quality of roads while reducing maintenance cost and improving the assets lifecycle.
Business benefits
Productivity Gains: All the maintenance processes and to do list are digitized now, thus helping the civil and electrical engineers across SPVs to perform activities in a systematic way. The same has been observed at O&M level. Hence, the asset lifecycle maintenance cost is reduced drastically.
Business Expansion: It was difficult to monitor 19 SPVs in a single place. This system provides facility to expand the business without any problem in terms of monitoring and managing.
Resource Rationalization: The application helps in identifying the labor usage for various activities per kilometer and optimizes the same by benchmarking.
SLA Defect Rectification: NHAI has a stringent SLA policy. If it is not monitored properly, heft fines are levied, which turns out to be in crores.
Document Availability: HMS acts as a single repository of information with a reduced retrieval time which in helps in increasing the productivity and performance.
Reports: Various analytical reports are made available in the system to monitor the assets performance, productivity and their usage.
Customer: HMS helps to monitor the defects. It ensures that the SLAs are met by standardized process of preventive maintenance and breakdown maintenance and alerts respective stakeholders on time.
Future plans
‘We want to improve the user interface and generate dashboards for various KPIs across SPVs to enable better decision making,’ says Sivasubramanian.
