Asset management in a centralised view

NSW Ports holds long term leases to manage New South Wales’ key trade gateways at Port Botany and Port Kembla and two intermodal assets at Enfield Intermodal Logistics Centre and Cooks River Intermodal Terminal, which play a key role in supporting New South Wales’ freight task.

These ports and intermodal facilities are strategic infrastructure assets for Australia and are critical to the current and future economic prosperity of New South Wales.

In 2019, NSW Ports engaged NGIS to increase the transparency and sharing of strategic information between teams. Their vision was to consolidate and display internal spatial data from different business units such as property and assets on a central management system.

Identifying spatial requirements

NGIS worked closely with the NSW Ports team to complete a business-wide Geographic Information System (GIS) scoping exercise, to define and capture specific use cases that aligned with the requirements of its various business units.

The key requirements were to:

• Establish a simple and user friendly web GIS portal.
• Display specific layers and functionality of spatial data held within NSW Ports’ business units.
• Curate access to relevant public spatial data.
• Integrate the GIS portal with core business systems to improve access to business data.

“The scoping exercise and the review of business use cases helped determine how useful a GIS tool would be and how it could potentially benefit our organisation,” said Sam Isaacs, Asset System Manager at NSW Ports.

Centralising data in a user friendly web viewer

Using the information uncovered through the scoping exercise, NGIS built a GIS Web Portal using Geocortex and PostGIS/Geoserver platforms that integrates information held within different management systems and displays it on an easy-to-use and accessible online map which is now available as a resource for all employees to use.

“The GIS Web Portal has democratised information, providing an easy to use tool for our employees to quickly find what they are looking for. For example, if someone wants to access information held within the property management system, such as the location of a tenant and the timing of their lease, you would previously have had to contact the property team for an answer. Now you can find the answer on the GIS Web Portal,” said Sam.

We focused heavily on user experience and designed the solution based on what team members wanted and how they were going to use the tool.”

Sam Isaacs, Asset System Manager , Nsw Ports.

Saving time using a single business management system

The Web GIS Portal has become a ‘go-to’ place for NSW Ports that supports:

• A centralised access point for cross-business spatial information.
• Insights and reporting on the NSW Ports property portfolio.
• Visualisation and reporting on asset condition assessments.
• A depth analysis tool that visually identifies areas above or below user defined depth criteria.

In the first three months alone, the Web GIS portal has been used over 500 times by NSW Ports , reducing time spent on responding to requests for information from within different business units, increasing team efficiency and saving on costs.

“A GIS Web Portal had always been considered a handy tool for the organisation, but we didn’t have the in-house GIS expertise to implement it. In conjunction with NGIS, we developed a ‘GIS as a service’ model suitable for NSW Ports operating environment. We championed this idea within the business, moving it from a ‘nice to have’ tool to an actual project, and it’s great to see the outcome,” said Sam. “We can now find and access information in ways that we weren’t able to before.”