Patrick Bonk
Tony Andrews
Asset and condition inspection data are at the foundation of how water professionals build out risk and asset prioritization plans – prioritization plans that are essential to how water utilities allocate their capital expenditures.
We listen to your feedback on how you manage condition assessment inspections and asset data, and our product and engineering development teams have been bringing your inputs to life with our latest updates to Info360 Asset. Our new changes provide greater flexibility and effectiveness when managing asset data and performing asset data exchange between inspection teams and asset owners.
An integrated workflow for inspections
It’s not uncommon for data exchange and project workflows between inspection contractors and asset owners to be conducted using a combination of Excel spreadsheets, GIS data, and CCTV survey footage – across disconnected databases with multiple emails to clarify all the details. When inspections are submitted separately from communication workflows, any issues or errors must be communicated arduously over email or via mobile calls between the office and the inspection site.
Our new inspection workflow in Info360 Asset allows inspection teams and asset owners to exchange data and communicate within the inspection and approval process directly inside the app. This makes it easier to track and manage inspections, identify errors, and capture feedback between inspectors and approvals teams in one central location.
With this workflow, asset owners can also easily flag issues with inspections, reject them if necessary, and provide feedback without leaving Info360 Asset. The inspector contractor can then make the necessary edits to address the issues and resubmit their inspections for acceptance. This complete workflow will streamline collaboration between inspector contractors and asset owners, simplify the submission, review and approval process – and perhaps most importantly, ensures that reviews, edits, and data exchange are transparently tracked.
Automated inspection merges
If a pipe has a blockage and requires multiple inspections from both the upstream and downstream ends, assessing the pipe’s risk of failure can be challenging. In these situations, partial inspections may be discarded, making a pipe’s condition assessment unavailable for risk and rehabilitation scoring. This limits the ability to accurately model your risk and plan for rehabilitation.
Based on your requests, we have introduced a feature that allows you to merge partial inspections on a pipe, including the associated CCTV survey footage and imagery, into a single inspection. The merging process includes applying rules such as inspections completed by the same contractor on the same day.
With this new capability, you can maximize the value of partial inspections that were previously discarded and include them in your risk and rehabilitation modeling.
The merged inspection includes ordered defects and their condition scores from upstream to downstream, along with the associated CCTV survey video footage and images. Overall, this capability improves the accuracy of your risk assessments and enables better planning for pipe rehabilitation. With a single risk rating from the merged inspections, you now have a clear assessment of the pipe’s risk of failure.
Asset data grid
Info360 Asset allows you to easily search and locate your assets and view their connected assets, spatial locations, and all your associated activities from condition assessments through to likelihood and consequence of failure analysis.
With this update we have delivered the ability to view asset information in a grid view, allowing you to efficiently locate and sort assets in a grid view, saving time and effort in searching for specific assets.
Some key attributes of the tabular view include:
- Modify and alter data directly within the table view pertaining to network elements such as pipes, manholes, pumps, tanks, and reservoirs.
- Sort for ascending or descending order and select multiple criteria with nested filters.
You can also translate your selection to a map view to get a visual overview of the assets and their associated information allowing for identification of critical assets that need replacement or rehabilitation. A simple yet common example is to identify orphaned inspections and attribute your unassigned inspection to its rightful asset.
With the new advanced criteria-based filtering, you can ensure that inspections are carried out on the correct pipes and validate all the associated inspection details are present when conducting your data reviews.
Standardized Date-Time format
For inspection and work order management, dates and times are essential markers for referencing and analysis. We have implemented a consistent approach to importing date-time data across the Info360 platform that can help with use cases such as reviewing CCTV inspection and associated work orders. This new date/time format update ensures date-time values from various sources, such as Esri tools, CSV files, and GeoJSON spatial layers, are imported consistently for accurate analysis and data handling across tasks.
Rapidly maturing, thanks to excellent feedback
Info360 Asset is a rapidly maturing product, and we’ve been working hard in the past year to consistently deliver added value to our customers. We couldn’t have made this much progress without the excellent user and market feedback we’ve received. If you’re an existing Info360 Asset user, or an asset hound who wants to switch to a web-based SaaS-based environment, we want to hear your feedback on the Innovyze Feedback Portal. And, of course, you can follow along with the progress of all of our apps on our Water Solutions Roadmap.