Sustainability: Saving The Planet AND Money
Implementing IS on T2T: Cost Benefit Assessment
The ISCA Infrastructure Sustainability (IS) Rating Scheme has provided a means of enabling performance monitoring and measuring of non-traditional project success factors and outcomes for the Torrens Road to Torrens River (T2T) project. This assessment describes the learnings and summarises the costs and benefits of implementing the IS rating scheme on the T2T project.
Key findings:
- Department Public Transport and Infrastructure’s (DPTI) trial of mandating verified IS Design and As-Built ratings as a contract requirement on T2T has been successful in creating a range of financial and non-financial benefits, which creates value for the State in the short and longer term, in addition to short term benefits to the T2T delivery consortium.
- Establishing a Sustainability Key Result Area (pain share / gain share arrangement) linked to the achievement of verified IS rating scores (KPIs) has had success in driving contractor decision making behaviours beyond cost, programme, quality and safety.
- The KRA gain share reward and capital savings from implementing two initiatives primarily driven by the IS rating (beyond contract and DPTI specifications) exceeded the total outturn costs for administering and resourcing the IS ratings and capital costs of those initiatives.
- Significant OPEX savings to asset owners have been forecast from one of these initiatives.
- Several non-financial benefits have been attributed to the specification and implementation of the IS rating process on T2T.
The project achieved an independently verified IS Design ‘Leading’ rating (v1.1) of 76.3 points and ‘Leading’ As-Built rating of 81.9 points, exceeding the KPI Exceptional score (maximum gain share target) of 66 IS points with significant sustainability outcomes. This is a notable achievement which would not have been attainable from BAU practices and standard DPTI specifications.
To optimise the value of sustainability and use of IS ratings on future projects, four recommendations are provided for the delivery consortium and ten recommendations are provided for DPTI, as contained in section 5 of this report.