By using the existing tolerance windows (min planned to max planned) to consolidate visits, 73% of location visits could be eliminated — reducing from 4,226 visits down to 1,121 across the year.
This means the same team is currently scheduled to visit the same location on average 3-4 separate days when, within the allowable maintenance windows, all that work could be batched into fewer visits.
| Metric | Current | Optimised | Saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total location visits (group+location+day) | 4,226 | 1,121 | 3,105 (73%) |
| Unique group+location combos with savings | 268 | — | — |
| Depot | Current visits | Optimised | Saved | % reduction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flinders Street | 571 | 121 | 450 | 79% |
| Clifton Hill | 456 | 129 | 327 | 72% |
| Newport | 424 | 98 | 326 | 77% |
| Carrum | 395 | 119 | 276 | 70% |
| East Malvern | 377 | 101 | 276 | 73% |
| South Kensington | 377 | 108 | 269 | 71% |
| Sunshine | 335 | 71 | 264 | 79% |
| Ringwood | 330 | 81 | 249 | 75% |
| Dandenong | 316 | 77 | 239 | 76% |
| Caulfield | 274 | 89 | 185 | 68% |
| North Melbourne | 192 | 39 | 153 | 80% |
| Spencer Street | 101 | 17 | 84 | 83% |
| MURL | 14 | 7 | 7 | 50% |
The most extreme cases of repeated visits to the same location by the same team:
| Work Group | Location | Current visits | Could be | Saved | WOs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flinders Street 1203 | Flinders St A | 89 | 11 | 78 | 418 |
| Spencer Street 1101 | Southern Cross | 87 | 9 | 78 | 316 |
| Flinders Street 1201 | Flinders St E | 85 | 8 | 77 | 287 |
| Newport 2201 | Newport | 80 | 10 | 70 | 300 |
| North Melbourne 1302 | North Melbourne | 73 | 10 | 63 | 291 |
| Dandenong 4301 | Westall | 71 | 9 | 62 | 333 |
| Clifton Hill 3301 | Epping | 68 | 10 | 58 | 254 |
| Ringwood 3201 | Box Hill | 35 | 5 | 30 | 115 |
For example, Flinders Street Section 1203 visits Flinders St A 89 separate times across the year to do 418 work orders. By batching work within the tolerance windows, this could be reduced to just 11 visits.
Each work order has a maintenance window defined by min_planned (earliest permissible start) and max_planned (latest permissible completion) as provided in the source data. The planned date currently sits at the midpoint of this window — consistent with system-generated scheduling from the ERP with no manual geographic optimisation applied.
The analysis uses a greedy merge approach: starting with the earliest visit, it checks whether the next visit's maintenance window overlaps. If it does, both visits could be done on a single trip to that location. This continues until no more merges are possible, at which point a new visit is required.
The scheduled work orders are predominantly inspections. When a team inspects an asset, they will often identify and carry out corrective work on the spot — adjustments, cleaning, minor repairs. This means a team visiting a location for 3 scheduled inspections may spend half a day there doing the inspections plus follow-up work.
Sending a team back to the same location the following day for 1 more inspection wastes a full return trip when that inspection could have been added to the previous visit with negligible additional time. The inspection itself may take 30 minutes, but the trip to get there and back, the access arrangements, and the administrative overhead represent a far greater cost.
Daily workload limits not modelled — batching all work at a location onto fewer days increases the work per visit. The practical limit depends on job durations (not available in this dataset) and the volume of corrective work arising from inspections. Actual labour hours have been requested from GPM.
The 73% figure is a theoretical maximum — applying practical capacity constraints would reduce this, but even a conservative 30-40% reduction in visits would represent a significant efficiency gain.
Travel time savings compound — this analysis only counts visit reduction within a single group+location. When a team eliminates a trip to one location, that day's travel to other locations is also avoided.
Each unnecessary visit to a location represents a return trip from the depot, access and protection arrangements, work pack administration, and team mobilisation. By batching work within existing maintenance windows, a significant proportion of these trips could be eliminated without any change to the maintenance standard or compliance requirements — work is simply done earlier or later within the allowable window to coincide with other work at the same location.