Asset Management Solutions (AMS) started from scratch in 2019 with a vision to provide the commercial property market with maintenance plans and condition surveys that were cost-effective and tailored to each site. Each plan can take days to write up in the office after the time spent on site recording data. AMS’s vision was to automate the process as much as possible, so that on-site surveyors would record data straight into tablets. That data would then be uploaded to a cloud-server and the report would be automatically generated and available online to the customer.

Peter Graham, Director of AMS;

“Matthew from Foundation and I had known each other for about 10 years and had kicked around a number of ideas for something like this but nothing had ever come to fruition. Then in late 2018 I teamed up with the guys at Veron Building Consultants and things started happening.”

Maintenance plans are like very complex spreadsheets where any cell can change and the change will affect financial projections for 20-30 years. These projections can influence commercial decisions involving a lot of money. AMS had the commercial acumen but lacked sufficient technological nous to make it happen and – for a start-up – setting up an internal software development team was too expensive.

So they approached us. Initially the idea was that we would supply technical assistance as required but this quickly morphed into us being the subcontracted developers charged with making AMS’s ideas become real.

Derek Walker, lead developer at Foundation was charged with assessing the prototype AMS provided as an indication of what was required;

“The prototype was very complex and included some techniques we hadn’t seen before. Translating it into a database-based app was a challenging and iterative task.”

The next three years were a pretty wild ride as AMS came to grips with the sheer breadth and sometime contradictory nature of providing ‘tailored’ requirements and Foundation came to grips with two recurring challenges; “How do we even do this?” and “How do we do it economically?”

And it needs be acknowledged that for a startup with a significant number of retirement villages as clients, COVID came at the worst possible time imaginable.

Despite all the challenges, the core of the project is established and features an iPad-based App that supports efficient data entry and photo capture before synchronising with the cloud-server. Internal staff and clients can log on via the web interface, edit data and generate reports. Of particular interest is the ability for clients to store related documentation (manuals, quotes, invoices etc) against various buildings and elements within buildings.

So does it work?

Well, don’t take our word for it – don’t even take AMS’s word for it – see what AMS’s clients have to say about it.

Thank you to Peter Graham.

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