How Matosinhos City Council improved the maintenance management of thousands of assets

About Matosinhos City Council

As part of the Porto Metropolitan Region (Portugal), Matosinhos is home to around 170,000 inhabitants and has around 2,500 employees. As a large municipality, it manages a wide range of buildings and facilities on a daily basis, from schools to theatres, sports facilities and social housing.

As a result, Matosinhos City Council’s maintenance operation is quite heavy and complex — a challenge even more demanding by the fact that this is a public organisation under constant scrutiny.

The Challenges

The advanced age and low level of education of the technicians

• The new solution had to be simple and intuitive.

• The new partner needed to train and support users closely and constantly.

The large number of assets

• There was an urgent need to reduce bureaucracy in problem-solving and increase efficiency.

• The new solution had to make communication between everyone involved more effective and faster.

The need to obtain more data

• The workflows, based on Excel tables printed on paper, were so intricate that some of the information was lost.

• The lack of control over crucial KPIs jeopardised transparency and investment in maintenance.

Centralise, simplify, control.

Managing so many buildings and assets, with countless people involved but not always with the necessary number of technicians and resources, was exhausting Pedro Machado, Head of the Buildings Division and responsible for maintenance management at the municipality, who felt his teams were demotivated and equally tired.

After an unsuccessful attempt to implement an internal system, Matosinhos City Council wanted to learn more about Infraspeak's potential and capabilities and ended up surrendering to this intelligent platform, above all because it has an interface that is easy to use, even for older, less tech-savvy employees.

The ability to centralise information on all assets, as well as the ability to make maintenance requests and report work as completed on the platform itself — all from a computer or mobile phone — soon began to make the operation more efficient, in a context where these features were particularly useful: the peak of the COVID- pandemic.

Being able to monitor work orders remotely and having the support of digital procedures made all the difference in these circumstances, particularly with the support of the NFC tags installed in the assets. The beginning of the partnership, which could have been rocky, proved the practical and functional side of Infraspeak, as well as the control and comprehensive vision it offers over the operation.

In compliance with all safety rules, an Infraspeak specialist trained and closely monitored the platform's users, who gradually realised the many advantages of this solution over the old procedures. Now, everyone has more autonomy and, at the same time, there is greater control and transparency, with excellent coordination between the different facilities and central management, such as between the City Council and its parishes. 

The systematic and categorised organisation of information, as well as the automatic transformation of important KPIs into consistent reports, now allows budgets and allocations to be negotiated in a more informed way, lowering costs and increasing productivity. These benefits, first experienced in maintenance, have already begun to be enjoyed by other municipal areas and divisions where Infraspeak's flexibility and scope are also being exploited, namely in the management of sports buildings, events and social housing.