How to Address These 4 Common Challenges in Asset Management for Your Utility

If there is one thing that unites a utility team from field-crew, to condition program managers and risk modelers, to utility stakeholders, it’s that they all need to know the condition of their assets and the plan to address asset problems. They each share their utility’s successes and challenges. While those challenges can vary from utility-to-utility, there are four common challenges utilities contend with when assessing asset failure risk and other asset issues.

1. Disconnected Data Systems Too much data but not enough useful information? This is not an unusual challenge, and it can stem from disconnected systems. Disconnected systems lead to several issues, such as duplicated data, communication issues, wasted investments and time when inspecting assets, poor asset management decisions, and asset data not being updated or updated correctly. Info360 Asset is a centralized asset data and information management system that is continuously updated with newly inspected, maintained, repaired, and replaced assets. This means that captured data and associated interventions are converted into valuable information that can be relied on. Changes to asset location, connectivity, condition and physical characteristics are performed based on auditable associated inspections rather than simply updating via GIS.

2. Inability to View ALL Inspection Data Are you focusing on current, updated data, but not really using historical data? Past condition data can be just as important, if not more! Additionally, completing projects can become even more challenging when condition data has been lost or is not allocated to the appropriate asset. With state-of-the-art asset management technology, you can compare changes within the asset condition assessment. All updated and historical data is easily managed, including inspection media and data, condition data, and risk calculations and trend all in one place. You can also import any tabular data of your CMMS data such as repairs, customer complaints, and frequency of cleaning.

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Get an easy-to-view map to identify problem hot-spots before developing a prioritization plan to fix your assets. Ultimately, it provides better connectivity between all assets, inspections, condition, and risk results.

3. Reactive Maintenance over Proactive Planning Risk modelers often struggle to determine risk of failure for each asset, due to the different rates of degradations, severity of failure of assets, and disruption to customers. These will vary based on the history of the asset condition (its age), the location of the asset, and proximity to environmentally-sensitive areas. Due to this struggle, reactive maintenance for repair and replacement of assets tends to be more common than proactive planning and staying ahead of the concerns, for utilities who don’t have an effective asset management approach yet. With our software solution, utilities, local councils, or their consulting firms can configure different likelihood of failure (LoF) and consequence of failure (CoF) models to determine and understand risk, which helps them to provide a plan for prioritization. Developing a plan supports both long- term capital planning as well as prioritizing new CCTV inspections, to be just as proactive in planning ahead as reactive in response.

4. Asset Failure

If an asset fails, the result is costly for asset owners to fix, disruptive for customers to endure, and can severely impact critical buildings and the environment. Asset repair or replacement is required, customer complaints come in, heavy fines can be issued if sewers affected natural bodies of water, and everyone looks around to identify where in the process they could have caught this sooner. Inspection and condition data may have been lost, risk of failure was not monitored, and critical assets were not maintained or renewed ahead of failure.

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There’s a solution that offers an inspection portal that streamlines the inspection upload and review processes for both the office and the field. Inefficiencies are limited as the office doesn’t have to wait for large media files to be uploaded from the field in areas of low bandwidth. The portal is designed to guide both in-house utility or contractor field crews by informing them which survey database or XML file (and their associated inspections and media) have uploaded successfully. Overall, utilities are provided with a productive process that promotes collaboration between the office and the field, and a system where everyone in the team can access all asset data in the same location, minimizing asset failure early on.

About Innovyze Innovyze, an Autodesk company, is a global leader in building innovative, industry-leading software for the water industry for over 35 years. Innovyze serves thousands of clients including the largest utilities, ENR design firms, consultancies and refining plants around the world.

Learn more at www.innovyze.com

Manage all your inspections in one place, and build productivity among your team Info360 Asset by Innovyze is one state-of-the-art platform to leverage well-managed assets, condition, and risk data to prioritize renewals, and further inspections, based on data- driven risk planning.

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