DC Water is a regional utility that provides drinking water, wastewater collection and wastewater treatment to more then 500,000 residential, commercial and governmental customers in the District of Columbia. In addition to its own jurisdiction, it also collects and treats wastewater for 1.6 million customers in its’ neighboring jurisdictions of Maryland and Virginia.
Providing critical services to such a large geographic area, DC WASA is daunted with issues in regards to managing the various assets within the multiple jurisdictions. In just the sewer and storm water arena alone, DCWASA operates over 1,700 miles of sanitary and combined sewers. To manage their asset and maintenance systems they are pursuing the acquisition of a computerized asset and maintenance management system, which will streamline their current processes.
Working under a multi-jurisdictional sphere, DC WASA approached tieBridge with a complex set of issues ranging from cost tracking to critical system maintenance scheduling. The key indicators of the performance of this system will consist on its abilities to:
Assets were managed using old protocols where systems cannot communicate with each other and processes lack the ability to work in unison. This is absolutely critical in streamlining and improving current processes. Some examples related to this hurdle are the following:
DCWASA’s goal is to leverage the capabilities of an effective Asset Management tool to manage the numerous assets throughout the organization in a manner where processes can be streamlined through better workflow management. The implementation of automated scheduling capabilities and the use of standardized work management procedures leading to enhanced work performance. In addition to significant operational benefits on the plant level, DC WASA looks to develop robust reporting and trend analysis capabilities.
Although DC-WASA has three core missions – providing drinking water, collecting wastewater, and treating wastewater, each system is highly intertwined with each other and requires a system that can interact with each other. This requires a great deal of flexibility in both compatibility of the software and the ability for the system to interact with various data types.
If both Plant and Infrastructure system development were to occur in the same environment, there would be continual issues regarding configurations that may be relevant to one but not the other.
The current WASA practice is focused on addressing problems in a reactive manner where issues are addressed and resolved when customer’s call to report a problem. Having an effective preventive maintenance program in place would alleviate some of the reactive maintenance and negative impact that it has. This would require an overhaul of the current processes and setting up new protocols.
Ideally, WASA would like to track each infrastructure asset including pipe segments. However, this is made difficult because of trying to identify all pipe segments and then placing a fair market value on each. This is complicated even further by the fact that much of the piping is quite old and documentation regarding location of these assets are sometimes sketchy and/or not as accurate as WASA would like them to be.
Training consists of providing the level of instruction required so that the intended system users have adequate knowledge to carry out their tasks and responsibilities as they relate to the A/M Program. This involves working with people with a wide range of computer backgrounds, where it will be difficult to estimate accurate training times for each area. Basic computer training might also have to be completed before any specific A/M training.
Due to the critical nature of the services provided, it’s crucial to test the system through various scenarios. Testing must include customer provided scenarios in addition to testing based on use cases.
District Of Columbia Water And Sewer Authority (DC Water) is a regional utility that provides drinking water, wastewater collection and wastewater treatment to more then 500,000 residential, commercial and governmental customers in the District of Columbia. In addition to its own jurisdiction, it also collects and treats wastewater for 1.6 million customers in its neighboring jurisdictions of Maryland and Virginia.
Covering close to 300 acres, the Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant is a constantly evolving Engineering marvel with several Engineering projects and upgrades at various development stages, taking place concurrently on multiple treatment processes, encompassing thousands of pieces of equipment at any given time, all while keeping the plant fully operational.
The original facility was built in the 1930's, and over time has been expanded and upgraded into the largest advanced wastewater treatment plant in the world. As part of the original plant construction, major upgrades and ongoing improvements, several million pages of Engineering records have been created and stored. These records exist in various ages and formats, ranging from regular and oversize paper records, photos, videos and other hard copy storage media, to electronic files including standard MS Office and Adobe Acrobat files, with records dating from the 1930's through the present day. In recent years, the document capture and storage requirements have become more complex with the addition of electronic Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) drawings. Historically, all final records have been warehoused in hardcopy format in a central records facility, utilizing thousands of cubic feet of valuable storage space, and creating huge challenges in document integrity, search, and retrieval, thus creating unwieldy inefficiencies and additional expenses to the authority.
The challenges of capturing, storing, and making Engineering records easily available to DC Water stakeholders at any point in time, in an on-demand, ongoing basis, as well as capturing changes to the records as multiple in process changes to the Plant occur, and cleaning up the existing backlog inventory of records posed huge technical, operational, and logistical challenges to the authority.
Based on a proven ability to deliver time and again, tieBridge Inc. was selected and tasked to lead, coordinate, and implement an enterprise wide process and technical solution to address these challenges in a timely and cost effective manner. tieBridge Inc., in coordination with various DC Water Departments, and external vendors, succeeded in addressing these challenges and led the design, development, and implementation of a multi-million dollar program to create and deploy an Enterprise Document Management System (EDMS) and an associated Engineering Management of Change (MOC) process that is intuitive, robust, scalable and effective, utilizing tieBridge's Project Management and technical capabilities, and Open Text Corporation's industry leading Enterprise Document Management solutions.
DC Water approached tieBridge with a complex set of functional and technical program requirements ranging from record cleanup, indexing, and digitization, to creation of the Engineering MOC and a record retention policy, and implementation of the program to approximately 500 members of the Engineering, Wastewater Treatment and Maintenance departments. The key indicators of the success of this system consisted of its abilities to:
Prior to implementation of EDMS and MOC, several record management and process issues were prevalent. Some examples of the challenges included:Incomplete, disparate Engineering datasets and data assets, with limited record accuracy.
The tieBridge team approached the challenges with a three-prong concurrent action plan:
The MOC and EDMS were piloted in Q4/2008 and went into full production in Q1/2009, on schedule and within budget.
This is a multi-year project given the scope and volume of records. Progress continues on a priority basis and will extend into 2010 and beyond. Initial results and feedback have been very positive from all levels of the organization, including a push to continue to fast track deployment of the solution to all Engineering stakeholders.
Enterprise wide deployment of the EDMS has begun in parallel to several other functional departments within the authority, along with several fully deployed department wide implementations in Production.
The successful implementation of the Engineering EDMS and MOC at DC Water highlights the importance of document and records management and the significant benefits that it brings. These benefits are measurable both in terms of return on investment and dramatic improvements in employee efficiency and effectiveness, and quality of service. In the case of DC Water, this translates to considerable cost savings. By working with the various stakeholders and adopting an approach that incorporates both return on investment and quality of service, tieBridge is able to bridge multiple diverse internal and external stakeholders and select, source, build, and deploy scalable, value add solutions that exceed client expectations.
Effective management of a utility Customer Information System (CIS) implementation requires requires very robust project management approaches, techniques, and skills. A CIS project is inherently complex requiring the integration of various disciplines, multiple tracks, and may well be the most risky technology project a utility undertakes. A CIS project typically involves business transformation, customer engagement, regulatory compliance, and an intimate understanding of customer experience components; as such, implementation success is much more difficult to achieve than technology success.
Given that project success is not a given in the utility industry (it is common knowledge that more than 80% of technology projects fail to meet their technical, cost, or schedule objectives), tieBridge plays a critical role in providing oversight of an ongoing CIS implementation or recovery from a failed implementation.
Effective management of utility infrastructure requires operators to think holistically about their networks. Operators need to not only know where their critical assets are but also understand the connections and relationships between those assets. In the event of a water main break, which valves should be closed to ensure that service disruptions impact the fewest customer households and businesses? In the event of a power outage at a wastewater lift station, which maintenance holes are at greatest risk for a sanitary sewer overflow? When catastrophic weather impacts a water treatment plant, how do the power, communications, heating, and water networks interact and influence each other to help head off cascading effects?
Managing assets as part of a network enables utilities to better understand and improve performance. Mapping assets and recording their key attributes—size, age, material type, etc.—are among the core functions of a geographic information system (GIS) which enables mapping with easy-to-use applications and advanced network management and modeling tools. These tools provide web-based networking capabilities that are designed to work on a smartphone as well as they do on a desktop computer. Teams across the organization, from the office to the field, can easily access information whenever they need it.
