Effective management of a utility Customer Information System (CIS) implementation requires...
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.
