Meg Riley
Water utilities that haven’t yet gone fully digital face numerous challenges when monitoring and managing water: ambiguous or disorganized operations management, poor information and data management, and – of course – maintenance issues. These issues compound when there is a limited budget for maintenance. If you find that you continually run up against the problem of unexpected asset failure, it can feel overwhelming to deal with it all. But the good news is that these problems can be solved with a little bit of innovation and organization of your assets.
Here are five things that get easier when you adopt a comprehensive asset management solution.
1. Your consolidated data naturally becomes more organized
It all starts with consolidating your historical, future, and present data and project information in one place. InfoAsset Manager can help secure your data in one location so that it becomes much easier to manage and analyze. It’s also easier to update the data with survey and repair information – all of the data that you want to pipe in and keep current. It will make your day-to-day operations much smoother, but this single source of truth gets even more valuable because then you can map all of your data to get a more complete picture:
- You’ll know exactly where the problems are, so you can create work orders and efficiently assign tasks to solve them.
- You’ll have a detailed list of physical characteristics and a history of every asset so you can make highly informed decisions about when and where to fix or replace.
- You’ll be able to deliver better service by identifying and prioritizing customer complaints.
Once you connect your asset, inspection and survey data, you’ll begin to see how other data might be incorporated. Wouldn’t it nice if you could include CCTV surveys or GPS surveys, eliminating the need for you to fire up a different system just to check one detail? Once you have a centralized location, you’ll want to keep making it better by incorporating additional data. Simply put, this first step is a big win because it naturally leads to further innovation.
2. Planning ahead becomes normal
Wasting time resolving maintenance concerns that could have been dealt with in the planning stage of a project puts a lot of stress on work crews – and on your budget. A robust risk analysis and capital prioritization engine like InfoAsset Planner puts your budget at the forefront by helping you identify the assets in your system that present the highest risk. With this kind of engine, you can:
- Consolidate all your asset-centric information
- Develop an asset prioritization master plan
- Build repeatable logic into your plans
- Leverage your existing ArcGIS maps
- Automate the creation of capital improvement plans
Once you’ve gained a full understanding of the risks in your system, you’ll be able to get more out of your inspections, but more importantly, it will help you build an asset renewal and replacement roadmap for your team – and banish the fix-it-after-it-breaks maintenance mentality once and for all.
3. You’ll be able to maximize your asset lifecycle
Managing your budget and getting the most from your capital is easier to achieve than you think. When you manage your data and store it in one place using Info360 Asset, your team and stakeholders can access and review it in real-time from the cloud to prioritize cleaning, repair, replacement, and further inspection. With the right technology, you’ll know where to allocate your capital and stay on track with your operation and maintenance budgets, while maximizing your asset lifecycle.
4. You’ll have more scheduling flexibility
Scheduling maintenance can be fraught with unexpected delays. If a customer cancels an appointment at the last minute or a worker calls in sick, you want the flexibility to reschedule or reassign tasks on the fly. When your data is organized on one platform and available using InfoAsset Mobile, your processes are also more organized, giving you and your field crew supervisors the ability to reschedule tasks and monitor work progress and productivity from either the office or a mobile device. When everything is up to date for the whole team, it’s easier to prioritize aging pipes that desperately need repair or replacement – and deprioritize details that can wait.
5. Once you have a map, you can truly see
When you adopt tools specifically designed for sharing water-related assets across your organization, you unlock new ways to peer into your processes. Are any assets missing photos, videos or documentation? You can quickly spot holes in a comprehensive system and plug them, making sure all your media is efficiently uploaded to the cloud from the field, validated against standards, and able to be conveniently reviewed from the office for asset condition and risk analysis.
Everyone wants to meet their financial goals and customer satisfaction targets, and those become a lot easier when you have a firm grasp on the status of every asset at your disposal. While asset management software like Info360 Asset will help you uncover cost savings and prioritize work to meet your financial and customer service commitments, its biggest value may lie in organisation itself. Committing to asset management best practices allows you to wipe away confusion about risk, get organized and get excited about tackling future challenges.
Want to know more? Set up a demo and let us show you how you can meet the challenges of the future with a smart asset management foundation – that’s now available with a SaaS component for maximum convenience and flexibility.