All over New Zealand there are dozens of hydro electric power stations generating electricity for rural and urban New Zealanders.

Between November 1999 and January 2000, thirteen of these power stations were setup to run the Workmate asset management and maintenance system for Trustpower.

"The need for an effective and easy to operate maintenance system is essential for today’s tradespeople and the ability to plan work in advance, to economically and safely manage the asset, should be considered mandatory for all essential service organisations according to Ian Lees, Generation Manager for Trustpower West Coast operations.

We selected Workmate after a through investigation of several systems and have been very happy with the results. Workmate is a very easy system to operate, is flexible and has some very powerful reporting capabilities.

Our aim is to run an effective maintenance section that is both efficient and accountable for all activity our maintenance staff and contractors undertake. To do this we needed a practical and flexible system that could be operated easily by trade staff. Workmate operates in a similar way to Microsoft products. This has enabled our maintenance team to pick it up very quickly and get it working for themselves.

We were able to perform much of the design of our database over the internet which was easier than I had expected and meant that we could see exactly how our system would look before the installation took place.

The AZZMAX team were very helpful and understood what we as Asset Managers needed to achieve.

The Workmate system is incredibly adaptable and allowed us to build a system that we could design for ourselves. This adaptability means that we have control over what the system looks like and could structure it to be understood by our trade and contract maintenance staff. We have not been running Workmate for long yet, however, we can already see the benefits of using an information tool as powerful as Workmate.