A participant requested to walk them through an example of how to use the Simple Infrastructure Asset Management Diagram 3.
Ross explains:
Thank you. Look, the walkthrough on the diagram takes about four hours in terms of looking at the detail.
Simply and very quickly if we’re looking at the one with the… it’s still up at the moment, the No. 3 diagram.
Levels of Service
You’ve got your Levels of Service, around what you are delivering. That might be a certain pressure of water, or the quality specification of the water, the chemical you are taking out of it, or metals, or whatever like that. It might be the measure of water.
So you’ve gone through – or your ability to respond to a break or a fault. So you’ve got that list of levels of service.
And at the end of the day, that has operational and/or maintenance, and/or renewal actions that you have to undertake to consistently deliver that. You’ve got to run water treatment plant, you’ve got take your arsenic out, whatever it is. And they all have costs associated.
So delivering Levels of Service, how would you define that for your water authority is a key part of asset management. The changes in demand are the next key part.
Future Demand
So it may be that you’ve got a big new industry, wet industry coming that’s going to take water from you. It may be you have one of those and they’re actually leaving your area. Your population might be growing or might be declining. All those factors.
And so, understanding this, and then the Demand as well – is obviously very topical in the US at the moment is what do you do when you got drought and you can’t, you haven’t got enough water coming into your system or you are going to restrict the water.
And so that’s all-around future demand planning and that has impacts on how you operate, maintain, replace. But they’re also going to have big impacts on your expenditure and your revenue.
I think Heather on the Inframanage blog a while ago made the point that in California, they made a 30 percent reduction in water use.
That’s a 30 percent reduction in volumetrically charged revenue, which is going to create problems for the water authorities there.
So there’s a, looking at Demand and how does that impact on how you manage your assets and delivering your services and both your Expenditure and your Financials.
Risks
And then there’s that Risk. And we’re just talking about that a minute ago. Some assets are at higher risk. Some activities are higher risks.
Typically, the Risks, if you don’t think about it, are the ones that will catch you out are if they are big ones.
And managing or mitigating or taking those risks so that they actually don’t – you can deal with them or sometimes have a change in the way that you manage the lifecycle of assets. How do you operate? How you maintain? How much preventive maintenance you do?
Lifecycle Management
With cyclic maintenance, sometimes at a very important asset, you might, in fact, choose to replace it well ahead of time, you’re not going to run it to failure.
In your treatment plants and pump stations that risk might be if you’ve got only one pump, then I need to be right on top of the repairs and the maintenance of that.
If I’ve got three pumps, then maybe one can fail before I have to get too worried about it.
And they all impact and then they all impact on the lifecycle decisions you make. Impacts on what you spend. What you spend impacts on the revenue that you need.
So that’s how that diagram works. A very simplified view, a helicopter view if you like, of asset management.
And then digging into each one of those topics can take quite a while.
I understand, Heather’s got some very good training that the EFC Network offers around those topics.
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