BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA: Mincom, a provider of software and services for asset-intensive industries, announced a significant new agreement worth $7 million with Western Power, which serves the electricity needs of nearly one million homes and businesses in Western Australia and maintains an electricity network comprised of nearly 88,000 km of power lines.

Through its adoption of Mincom Mobility solutions, Western Power will enable 1,600 operational field employees to access real-time data about the state of every company asset – such as power poles and street lights – remotely from their mobile devices, as a press release adds. The deployment of Mincom Mobility represents a major step forward for our organisation, helping us shift from disparate inspection systems to a solution that fully integrates inspections with the corporate asset-management system, enabling a more proactive asset-maintenance program,” said Leigh Sprlyan, chief information officer at Western Power. “Detailed information needed to manage company assets – from their location and structural composition, to worker availability and required skills – will help us optimise scheduling decisions and, in doing so, even more cost-effectively manage our workforce and contractors. And advanced features, such as Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping, will further enhance our visibility of both the state of our assets and the work plan, ultimately improving our ability to manage the network.”

For more than 10 years, Western Power has successfully streamlined its asset infrastructure with Mincom Ellipse, the leading solution for Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) for asset-intensive industries. After a substantial re-evaluation of applications supporting the company’s core business processes, Western Power decided to further extend its use of Mincom Ellipse to improve productivity, seamlessly meet regulatory standards, and reduce operating costs.

Under the new contract, Western Power will upgrade to the current release of Mincom’s EAM platform, Mincom Ellipse 6.3. In addition, Western Power has licensed Mincom Mobility, a suite of end-to-end, fully integrated mobile applications for automating field-force operations using mobile devices such as laptops, tablets and PDAs. The company has also licensed Mincom Critical Inventory Optimisation (MCIO), software that helps analyse and adjust stock levels and reordering requirements on an ongoing basis. Western Power will also use Mincom Axis B2B, a hosted solution providing business-to-business integration and Web applications to optimise business processes between trading partners.

Western Power is an electricity-networks corporation responsible for the transmission and distribution of electricity in the southwest region of Western Australia. Consisting of nearly 88,000 km of power lines, its electricity network is one of the largest isolated networks in the world, it says.