Speaking

Trying to make decisions about water or wastewater assets without the appropriate data is challenging at best. However, relatively few water and wastewater utilities have a documented approach or policy for defining assets, what attribute data to collect for assets and how to organize assets in a hierarchy.

While it may seem like a daunting task, having that information is game-changing for organizing a preventative maintenance program, tracking failure history and planning for asset replacements. 3D modeling tools can change how you view and interact with this information when you can see a facility and all its assets in one place.

Asset Management

The most fundamental tasks in managing infrastructure are to define what are and are not assets, develop an asset register, assign unique asset IDs to each asset and specify the attributes associated with each asset type for which data should be collected. Organizing a preventive maintenance program (e.g., inspections and condition assessments) and tracking failure history is more difficult without this data. Asset condition, criticality and asset risk data are also difficult to organize, access and analyze without a clean asset register. Without easy access to this data, determining appropriate decisions to maintain assets and when to replace them is more challenging than it needs to be.

However, as fundamental as these determinations are and as valuable as the benefits are, relatively few water and wastewater utilities have a documented approach or policy for defining assets, what attribute data is collected for assets and how to organize assets in a hierarchy. Many utilities have gone through several generations of asset lists and have assets that are not numbered appropriately, there are duplicate asset IDs, and in many cases, data is simply missing.

During the first part of this presentation, audience members will learn:

• How to develop an asset definition
• How to determine which attribute data to collect
• How to document each asset based on ISO standards
• Different asset naming conventions.