Keeping Regulators Happy: Actionable Asset Management Plans for Water Utilities Juston Manville Many states have Clean Water State Revolving Funds to develop strategic asset management plans (SAMPs). Since strategies used in asset management are very similar to those outlined in most consent order corrective action plans, why not be proactive by creating a SAMP before regulators come knocking?
Asset Management Framework The practice of asset management uses an active management framework to help organizations realize the best value for their assets. Asset managers do this by balancing capital expenditure (CapEx) and operational expenditure (OpEx) based on business risk exposure (BRE), with an eye on continuous improvement. The SAMPs are data-driven
and developed with engineering, operations, information technology, and finance department input. To maximize organization performance, using an asset management approach, the following steps should be taken: Develop an Authoritative Asset Register/ Asset Hierarchy There is a saying that “you can’t manage what you don’t know.” It’s not a coincidence that most corrective action plans start with the requirement for a mapped inventory of assets. The foundation of asset management is an authoritative asset register and an inventory of managed assets in a hierarchical format. Asset hierarchies can be organized functionally by systems and processes or by asset location. What’s important in organizing assets is that managed assets have a parent-child relationship. Each asset’s cost and condition can be “rolled
up” to make data-driven decisions across asset classes. Define Level of Service Goals Motivational speaker Zig Ziglar has said, “A goal properly set is halfway reached.” Setting level of service (LOS) goals is where active management of assets starts and, unfortunately, where most corrective action plans end. Too often, there are references to setting goals, but there is little follow-up. I recently worked with a client that has been under a “draft consent order” since 2005. In reading the mandate and the corrective action plan, I didn’t see targets or goals set around getting out of the order of consent. My immediate recommendation for this client was to develop LOS goals and measure the criticality to mitigate risk using BRE. According to the Water Environment Foundation (WEF), BRE is “a method of calculating (scoring) the
Continuous Improvement Method
46 May 2022 • Florida Water Resources Journal
