In 2016, PCSG Australia launched in Melbourne to support infrastructure asset owners and operators in Australia and South East Asia respond to the scale and complexity of the challenges they faced.
Five years on, Colin Mann, Consulting Director, Digital Infrastructure, provides a crisp overview of our industry-leading work supporting major clients on their digital journeys.

At PCSG Australia, we are celebrating five years of offering digital advisory services, working with a huge variety of clients and projects.

During this time, the BIM, digital engineering and digital twin landscape has developed significantly. As a supplier to this market, we have similarly evolved, developing our capability through experience in strategic advisory, technical consulting and solution implementation.

 

 

Our goal is to enable digital transformation in the delivery and operation of buildings and infrastructure - ultimately to optimise the built environment. We understand that transformations of this nature require end-to-end expert support, both in terms of the asset lifecycle (planning to operations) and program delivery (scope to implementation). We provide a unique combination of strategic, technical and solution advisory services across the asset and digital change program lifecycles, for a range of public and private sector clients including transport, utilities and local government. For example, in recent months, we have provided strategic and solution advisory services to a major rail operator. Critical to success in this case was our ability to develop a target state and business case around defined use cases, and subsequently deliver against these use cases through a proof-of-concept technology environment, supported by analytics of live client data.

Strategic Advisory: What should we do, why and in what order?

 

 

 

In the complex and rapidly-changing world of the digital built environment, asset owners face a major challenge getting off the starting blocks in their digital journey. Our strategic advisory services are all focused on ‘why’: setting a vision, valuing benefit and business case, defining a target state and plotting the roadmap for delivery.

We have provided this service for a range of clients, from major public sector transport agencies (e.g. Department of Transport and Main Roads, QLD) to private sector utilities (Western Water, VIC), who value our ability to combine detailed technical capabilities in Digital Engineering with sound business and economic consultancy.

Technical Advisory: How will this work in the real world?

 

Many of the best strategic plans still fail in the transition to practical implementation. Our strategic advisory services are grounded on and informed by our experience of technical delivery. Building on a strategic roadmap, we help clients develop a detailed implementation plan to build capability across Process; Organisation; Technology and Information (POTI). Some of our key technical advisory services include:

  • The development of target state processes in line with the strategic target state
  • Information Management services, including requirements definition (OIR, AIR, EIR) and deliverable assurance
  • Change Management; planning, communication and technical training.

Example clients of these services include Fonterra (New Zealand) and Queensland Corrective Services, for whom the processes and information requirements developed allowed their digital objectives to be delivered progressively during project delivery.

Solution Advisory: How will our vision, plans and processes be brought to life through technology?

 

 

Alongside organisational and procedural developments, appropriate technology needs to be designed, procured and implemented. There are multiple options in a dense vendor market, ranging from basic ‘off the shelf’ solutions to more sophisticated integration environments. We work with clients to assess these options against business case objectives, design the optimum target architecture and manage procurement and implementation processes. Using our capabilities in system integration and data analytics, we develop ‘proofs of value’, deploying technology concepts to assure feasibility and gain buy in.

For Queensland Rail, we were able to design a target architecture and rapidly develop a proof-of-concept environment, surfacing structured asset data, documents and models in context, alongside analytical outputs of a combined performance, maintenance and operational data set.

Look out for our forthcoming series of articles in which we’ll delve a little deeper into our strategic, technical and technology advisory services.