Asset Management Strategy – Do Data Check and Analyze Well

So what I’ve got now, very quickly some examples.

So this is the Dunedin City Infrastructure Strategy for water, water waste or stormwater through 2060. (See image above).

Thinking about infrastructure waves, so thinking just to help you, the dark blue is water treatment renewals.

That’s treatments, so what does that graph show you jump out of here, that graph. There are two things that you should notice on that.

So what is this? Cause this is now. What do you think this is?

No. Backlog. It’s not backlogged. It’s not real. Okay. That’s poor information. Because they don’t have $70 million worth of water or wastewater or renewals to do this year.

What they’ve got is a whole heap of pipes in their asset management information system, where they don’t have decent age data and material types of and they haven’t fixed the data up. Okay? Yes.

[Theuns commented that they did some modeling and they discovered quite a few years that the install and ages were not correct]

So, they haven’t fixed that, have they Theuns? Because it’s showing up on a graph that they published publicly that I can get hold of.

So, here’s your first tip, when you see something like that, put on your, is that real hat? No.

They’re not going to have that much of the network all landing at the same time. That’s poor data.

So, the first thing you do when you do these sorts of things, and for asset management strategies, do the data check. Do the reality check. Do the data scrub.

This is the second thing that you should have noticed, what’s that? I just told you about that a few minutes ago, that’s treatment renewals.

So, Dunedin City has just spent in the last decade around about $700 million on wastewater and water treatment upgrades.

Okay, 450 for the wastewater, about 200 for the water. And that is the replacement of process trains.

You don’t have to replace everything when you do because there are several kinds of stuff, the big tanks and that will all survive. That’s process train replacement. And it’s a big lump.

And guess what it’s right where, for them, they’re showing it from 2035 to 2040. So, that’s that wave effect again.

So, they built them just in the last decade, here they are and they will be getting replaced again, around about a year.

So, when you’re trying to do those forward projections, that’s a big lump of money. And so, that has impacts on some of the other stuff they might want to do.

So, the other thing is, they smoothed their data through and it’s basically, you can say, setting it at about $20 million a year that they’ve got to spend.

Now the bad news for them as they recently built a lovely big Rugby Stadium in Dunedin, that cost them $300 million and they took on a lot of debt to do it.

They don’t have $20 million a year to fix utilities so they’ve got some problems there, but at least they know the size of the problem and can start making some decisions about it.

The first thing they need to do clearly is to fix up their data.

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FEATURED IMAGE CREDIT: Bernard Spragg NZ via Flickr Creative Commons License. The photo has been edited to suit website requirement.