Overview
In rare cases, a failed implementation results in a client asking a new team to start over. That was the case when DC Water — a regional utility providing drinking water, wastewater collection, and wastewater treatment to more than 500,000 customers in the District of Columbia, plus municipal wastewater processing for 1.6 million customers in the neighboring jurisdictions of Maryland and Virginia — required a re-implementation of its Enterprise Asset Management System (EAMS).
Providing critical services across such a large and jurisdictionally complex area brings real difficulty in managing the assets within it. In the sewer and stormwater function alone, DC Water operates more than 1,700 miles of sanitary and combined sewers. To manage its assets and maintenance work, the utility had acquired Maximo, a modern EAMS platform used by several national utilities — but the first implementation attempt had not delivered a system the organization could actually run on.
The challenge
Working across a multi-jurisdictional service area, DC Water faced a complex set of issues spanning cost tracking to critical system maintenance scheduling. Assets were managed using old protocols where systems could not communicate with each other and processes could not work in unison — a gap the re-implementation needed to close directly:
- Data compatibility. DC Water's three core missions — drinking water, wastewater collection, and wastewater treatment — are highly intertwined, requiring a system flexible enough to interact cleanly across all three rather than treating them as separate silos.
- Plant and infrastructure coexistence. Running plant and infrastructure asset management in the same environment risked continual configuration conflicts between requirements relevant to one but not the other.
- A reactive maintenance culture. The organization's prevailing practice was to address problems only after a customer called to report one. Shifting to effective preventive maintenance meant overhauling established processes and protocols, not just installing new software.
- Tracking infrastructure assets. DC Water wanted to track individual infrastructure assets, including pipe segments — complicated by the difficulty of identifying every segment, assigning fair market value, and working from documentation that was, in places, old and unreliable.
- Training across a wide skill range. Users came in with very different levels of computer literacy, making training time difficult to estimate and, in some cases, requiring basic computer training before any system-specific training could begin.
- Testing under real stakes. Given the criticality of the services involved, the system needed to be tested against both customer-reported scenarios and structured use cases before it could be trusted in production.
Underlying all of this were specific integration gaps the first implementation had left unresolved: the plant maintenance management system did not communicate with ECIS, leaving Customer Care Associates unable to give customers accurate, timely status on work; there was no consistent way to monitor infrastructure condition over time; and asset data was scattered across disconnected sources — a Greeley and Hansen sewer collection system survey, county maps, and separate Microsoft Access databases for hydrants and valves — with open questions about which of them could actually be trusted.
Our approach
tieBridge's re-implementation was structured around what an effective asset management tool needed to deliver for DC Water: streamlined workflow management, automated scheduling, standardized work management procedures, and the reporting and trend-analysis capability the utility needed to move from reactive to preventive operations. That meant treating this as an organizational and process re-implementation as much as a technical one — reconciling the disparate data sources into a trusted asset system of record, defining workflows that could span drinking water, wastewater collection, and treatment without configuration conflicts, and building a training approach that could meet users at very different starting points.
Impact
- Replaced a failed implementation with a working Enterprise Asset Management System spanning DC Water's three core missions, rather than leaving the utility to patch around the original rollout's gaps.
- Structured the system to finally connect plant maintenance activity with customer-facing status information — closing the gap that had left Customer Care Associates unable to answer basic customer questions.
- Established a path from reactive, call-in-driven maintenance toward a preventive maintenance model, backed by consistent asset condition data rather than disconnected spreadsheets and surveys.
- Gave a multi-jurisdictional utility — serving over 500,000 direct customers and 1.6 million more through neighboring wastewater processing — a single trusted asset management platform to manage infrastructure across three intertwined missions.