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Asset management is an integral part of the water sector, as it helps to ensure that water resources are supervised efficiently and effectively. It also helps decrease water waste and conserve resources. This article examines the scope of asset management.
Fremont, CA: The water sector faces numerous difficulties in a constantly evolving world. More than 3,700 North American water professionals ranked the major water sector concerns in a 2022 report issued by the American Water Works Association. The top three issues of the day were updating and replacing outdated infrastructure, capital improvement financing, and long-term accessibility of the drinking water supply.
The Institute of Asset Management has identified several other significant sector concerns, including cyber and physical security, climate change, resilience and future-proofing, equality, social justice, digital transformation, and data management.
Finding isolated fixes for any of these problems might not solve them or even undermine attempts to mitigate the effects of another. Instead, a method that adopts a whole lifecycle perspective of resources, personnel, and systems is required. It also requires a consistent framework for risk-based decision-making.
Asset management is not a brand-new field; individuals and institutions have been doing it for a long time. But more recently, asset management has become a recognized discipline that businesses can use to optimize the value of their physical assets while controlling costs, service levels, and risk. Water professionals and companies should embrace this standardized and disciplined approach to asset management as a fundamental business capability.
Asset Management in Practice
The practical implementation of asset management will differ depending on the organization.
Delivering safe and dependable water is the primary objective of a water service located several miles from its main assets. It might even establish low pressure/flow, leakage, and outage occurrences not to exceed norms.
A water utility must identify and deal with bad actors or mains prone to failure and whose failure would significantly affect public health and safety, brand reputation, financial bottom line, and the environment to achieve its goal from its mains.
To identify high-risk mains, the utility must cooperate across its workforce to implement disciplined asset management. This would ensure that the appropriate data is collected. Such information can include pipe size, location, cost of failure, and leak events.
This is the operation of asset management: it is an ongoing, cross-organizational endeavor to manage resources most effectively to maximize their potential as determined by the organization. When deciding which assets to replace or refresh, the water utility uses data to guide its selections. This consequently provides it with a comprehensive understanding of its future finance requirements and the ability to provide convincing arguments to regulators and stakeholders at every stage.
