Natural Resources Wales Flood Risk Assessment

Natural Resources Wales (NRW) is a Welsh Government Sponsored Body which came into being in April 2013, largely taking over the functions of the Countryside Council for Wales, Forestry Commission Wales, and the Environment Agency in Wales, as well as certain Welsh Government functions. 

NRW employs almost 1,900 staff across Wales with a budget of £180 million. Its purpose is to ensure that the environment and natural resources of Wales are sustainably maintained, sustainably enhanced and sustainably used, now and in the future. The priority outcomes it is required to achieve is set out each year by the Welsh Government.

NRW manages seven per cent of Wales’ land area, which includes 311,000 acres of woodlands and many National Nature Reserves. It also operates water and flood defences, five visitor centres, and recreation facilities including over 680 miles of mountain bike, horse riding and walking trails, hatcheries as well as an accredited laboratory.

NRW has lead responsibility for flood risk management in Wales for main rivers and the sea and it owns and maintains over 15,000 flood assets which includes almost 319 miles of flood defences which reduce the risk of flooding to over 73,000 properties. Maintaining these assets is essential to protecting people and property from flooding. 

Why change?

In July 2015, NRW replaced a legacy Asset Management system from the Environment Agency, with a new system, “Asset Management eXpert” (AMX).

The reasons for change included: 

• Removing a legacy system and service provided by the Environment Agency, resulting in reduced costs to NRW and provide value for money.

• Providing a new solution which brings together in one place all the information and functionality to deliver Total Asset Management for our Flood Assets.

• Obtaining a solution which is flexible to allow NRW to make system changes to reflect changing business needs. 

• Obtaining a solution which can include any other NRW Assets. 

Why AMX?

Following early demonstrations and a comprehensive tender process, it became clear to the NRW Project Team that the AMX solution would not only meet our immediate requirements, it would also be flexible to respond to our future business needs. Importantly, the feedback we received from their existing customers was that AMX Solutions Ltd were excellent to work with and this has certainly been our experience.

How has AMX supported NRW?

On the award of the contract, a significant scoping project was carried out to agree the specific requirements of the system to fit NRW’s existing business processes and help develop new ones. With a dedicated account manager and developer, the AMX Solutions team spent five months working closely with the NRW ICT team and the NRW Business Users Project Team, to customise AMX to meet NRW needs and implement the functionality required for the introduction of the first phase in July 2015.

First Phase implemented:

• Import of Flood asset information for Wales from a legacy system.

• Flood asset inspection.

• Public Safety Risk Assessment.

• Using AMX in the field environment including field data capture for Flood asset inspection.

• Flood asset defect reporting.

• Map view of flood assets.

• Programming, Scheduling & Reporting of Asset Inspection.

• Role specific & permission-based interface. 

Future

Work is underway to implement other data and functionality, such as:

• Flood asset maintenance information for Wales.

• Using AMX in the field environment including field data capture for Flood asset maintenance work.

• Integration with NRW Document Management System & NRW Geographical Information System. 

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"Bringing together all of our Flood Asset information into AMX, will allow us to make better decisions on how we spend public money to maintain our flood assets to protect people and property from flooding. Our users have already told us that AMX is straightforward to use and easy to navigate. We are already receiving positive feedback on future enhancements that users would like to see. The beauty of AMX is that its flexibility will allow us to be able to implement enhancements, which will improve the information and functionality available to our users."

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"Our experience of working with AMX Solutions, in particular Karen and Will, has been totally positive, we have provided them with some significant challenges which they responded to on every occasion. We look forward to continuing the excellent working relationship with them to develop a market leading Asset Management System"

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Gareth Jones, Project Manager, Natural Resources Wales.