Increasing responsiveness and maximizing resources are important factors in how alternative energy companies improve their business in today’s data-driven, performance-based markets. The ability to deliver projects on time and within budget is one measure of that performance. Another is how efficiently operations and maintenance are managed and achieved. The effective delivery and maintenance of property and assets are fundamental to achieving a company’s objectives in any project that involves real land assets and property stakeholders. A well designed and implemented land asset and royalty management system can substantially improve these capabilities.
Major benefits of an alternative energy management system can be found throughout the lifecycleof a project.This blog will briefly review the benefits that an alternative energy management system will achieve when implemented properly.
1) Land and Contract Management
The alternative energy management system makes it possible to quickly and reliably identify property owners. This results in a large reduction in errors that can come from seeking approvals from the wrong interest holders. This is especially true in cases where a property may have spilt interest among individuals, corporations and other entities that all have a say in the property.
Special conditions add to the complexities. They become part of the negotiations and subsequently the executed agreements. A streamlined collection, review and approval process that leverages electronic workflows and notifications speeds projects toward completion with fewer errors. That translates into cost savings.
Quickly locating assets including turbines, met towers, solar arrays, interconnects, crossings, etc. increase efficiencies in operations and maintenance. Field and office staff visualizes work items, contact the correct parties involved, and spot trends that might otherwise go undetected in the office or in the field with mobile technology.
2) Payment Management
Royalty payments are based on several variables: base rent, crop damage, access roads, flicker, production, etc. and quickly burden with multiple variables in constant flux. Collecting, approving and monitoring information from the agreements for each property or set of properties can dramatically reduce cycle times and eliminate errors in an electronic system.
Automatic payments and bill reminders are calculated with little to no interaction, only requiring a spot check and approval before being passed to an accounting system for processing.
1099 forms and other documents leveraging database information are also generated automatically though a centralized system. That benefit also reduces errors and, ultimately, costs.
3) Inventory Management
Maintenance of power facilities, especially wind farms, requires tracking parts for turbines and usage of spares. Trends can be identified in those parts that wear on certain assets quicker and proactive maintenance can be scheduled with automated reminders.
When the usage of spares is tracked, the inventory list is updated and a replacement request to the inventory can be sent to the manager charged with maintaining spares for reorder.
Tied with a maintenance scheduler, the inventory management will identify and notify automatically when a particular set of parts are due for replacement. The system will then compare on-hand inventories and historic usage and identify parts before they are needed. That alerts the manager of which parts should be ordered to ensure they are always available when needs arise.
A data management system tailored to the alternative energy industry has many other benefits other than the three points discussed above. Any information contained in a modern system can be leveraged to generate documents. Reports can be scheduled based on key performance indicators, produced and sent automatically to authorized individuals in your team. Legacy systems can be leveraged to their full extent with interfaces with other applications like SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, Open Docs to name only a few.
New to geoAMPS? We are a mobile and cloud-based asset management company for managing land rights and infrastructure assets. Our industry-leading technology helps companies automate land management, payments, rooyalties, operations and maintenance, inspections and code enforcement to increase productivity and reduce errors. On average, our clients experience increased efficiency of 35 percent. Learn more here.
Nathan Mirolo is Marketing Lead for geoAMPS, a technology company in the Columbus, OH, area that specializes in software solutions to manage land rights and infrastructure assets. For more information, call 614-389-4871 or visit www.geoamps.com.
