Summary
- Whilst it is universally understood that water plays a vital part in our existence, the importance of water assets and their effective management is often overlooked. The water sector is subject to many compounding risks and challenges such as aging assets, population growth, climate change, demographic movement due to global crises, and high customer expectations.
InfoAsset is the only water industry-specific solution in the market designed to address wet infrastructure’s unique requirements and provide comprehensive end-to-end lifecycle support. It offers specialised tools to empower organisations to make more informed and efficient asset management decisions.
- The water sector’s infrastructure decision-making requires more rigour and substance. This was highlighted in a study conducted by the Australian Infrastructure Audit in 2019, where poor performance reporting and data collection, lack of transparency, and weak long-term planning were cited as areas of major concern[1]. This echoes an earlier report done by the Queensland Audit Office in 2016 on the long-term sustainability of local government, which revealed that most councils plan poorly for the long-term. Out of 77 councils in Queensland, they found that only 8 had up-to-date Asset Management Plans (AMP), only 26 had their AMP linked to their long-term financial plan, and 0 had developed their AMP to cover the entire expected life of their assets[2].
The issue of poor long-term planning is magnified by the risks and challenges that the sector is facing. Most of our cities’ water infrastructure were designed and built many decades ago for a nation of different scale and requirements. In the coming years, bulk of these assets will require replacement as they reach their end-of-life, or their inability to service growing demand. A multitude of other significant factors add to the complication, such as climate change, global crises, and high customer expectations.
InfoAsset is a purpose-built solution designed to empower the water sector to make better informed asset decisions to ensure continued service quality, reliability, and affordability. It is the only wet infrastructure decision-support tool in the market that seamlessly integrates with hydraulic modelling platforms to marry asset capacity to asset condition. InfoAsset incorporates the International Standards Organisation (ISO) 5500X principles, in addition to specific Australian standards such as IPWEA Practice Note 5 (Stormwater), Practice Note 7 (Water Supply and Sewerage) principles, and full support for WSA-05 Conduit Inspections Reporting Code of Australia.
Data transparency and confidence
Complete and accurate asset information is imperative to making sound intervention and investment decisions. Typically, organisations utilise a wide array of information systems to collect, manage, store, and analyse corporate datasets (e.g., GIS, asset register, CCTV Surveys, CMMS, billing system, SCADA, hydraulic model, finance system). In contrast to asset managers, custodians of these datasets are not often driven to perform data analysis that crosses functional and departmental divisions. This challenging task must be performed by asset managers on data that may have been captured for purposes tangential to asset management, such as taxation or contract management.
InfoAsset provides state-of-the-art data integration, validation, inferencing, and cleansing tools. It ties together disparate data sources to present a single view of assets but an unlimited number of planned spending scenarios. A functionality that sets InfoAsset apart is its ability to automate data interexchange and workflow processes. The solution can be configured to automatically synchronise with the organisation’s data streams, and run predefined methods (e.g., filter, look up, conversion, calculation) on a set frequency. With InfoAsset, asset decisions are always based on best available data without the resource strain required to keep up with data volume and velocity.
Moreover, the solution tracks every data field for changes and sources. Each piece of information can be traced over time to understand who, when, where, and why changes are made to the dataset with each version of the data rapidly visible and recoverable. Organisations can use this to gauge their confidence-level on forecasts and plans based on the quality of data used as input.
Data-driven tactical and strategic plans
An understanding of asset criticality, combined with a quantitative grasp of the underlying causal factors likely to induce failure, is highly valuable in formulating a targeted and evidence-based approach to rehabilitation, repair, and renewals planning.
InfoAsset provides highly customisable, wizard-based tools to enable the water sector to rapidly build industry-standard tactical and strategic plans, whilst configuring their own organisation’s risk framework within the system. It empowers organisations to move towards ‘advanced’ asset management by adopting a ‘bottom-up’ approach, where information for individual assets is utilised to support the optimisation of activities and programs to meet agreed service levels. The step-by-step approach allows users to set up any number of condition and criticality assessments from the automatically managed data lake. Datasets are not omitted from decision logic because they are ‘incomplete’, rather, all available data are utilised. Risk assessments can then be set up to model current and future risk levels and report results by individual asset, by zone, or by whole network summary.
The solution offers a robust capital prioritisation engine via a user-defined logical decision tree. Organisations can build their decision workflow by incorporating any formatted logic as decision point and receive specific rehab recommendations as conditions are met. This leads to repeatable and defensible decision-making based on the best available data instead of human judgement. It is also easy to trace back in time to audit factors that drove a specific asset decision. Multiple plans can be set up to look at different tactical and strategic options over a planning horizon and perform a comparative analysis of various approaches.
To determine the optimal timing of asset interventions, InfoAsset’s Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) tool looks at asset deterioration, planning settings, cost settings, and risk tolerances to maximise OPEX and CAPEX budgets. Taking total ownership cost into account, LCCA presents informed investment strategies by using a rigorous risk-based economic life planning approach to accurately estimate the lifetime performance of assets, in addition to an in-depth view of the long-term cost of maintaining, operating, upgrading, and replacing them.
InfoAsset empowers the water sector with the latest advancements in innovation and technology to adopt a data-driven, robust, and future-proof approach to making asset decisions.
- InfoAsset is a commercial out-of-the-box solution (COTS) developed by Innovyze
Innovyze created a water industry-specific asset management software solution as a response to countless requests for asset condition and depreciation functionality in our internationally prevalent hydraulic simulation software. The market demand for water asset-specific condition assessment and CAPEX planning tools has been overwhelming. This is evidenced by the fact that over 90% of InfoAsset customers implement the solution as a complimentary ‘fit for purpose’ enhancement to their enterprise asset management and/or CMMS solution.
Niche technical software is proliferating where enterprise software once ruled court. InfoAsset is a solution that empowers end-user success by delivering specialised tools, rather than a ‘jack of all trades’, non-industry specific platform that caters only to executive management needs.
Innovyze’s contribution is further evidenced by our active involvement in the WSA-05 (and similar international) working group, our partnerships with key industry players (e.g., WinCan, Lucity, CityWorks, Electroscan), and our certification status with industry bodies such as NASSCO. Innovyze heavily promotes best practice asset management through educational webinars, paper publications, and keen industry engagement and participation.
- Automated asset data management
Promoting the adoption of an Information Management Strategy, InfoAsset supports organisations in fully realising their investments in their existing information systems and asset data collection initiatives. The solution integrates with most common data sources and automates data workflows and processes, thus eliminating manual and repetitive data-handling tasks.
Figure 1: InfoAsset breaks down data and inter-departmental silos by providing a single asset view.
As an ‘asset-centric’ solution, every piece of information in InfoAsset (e.g., incidents, surveys, work orders, customer complaints) is linked to the asset with a timestamp and source. This allows users to reference, analyse, and report asset performance over time. This also enables users to further drill-down on their analysis and use every related asset information as input to asset planning (e.g., Which zones reported the highest number of asset failure? Which assets are suffering from poor serviceability due to mass root intrusion? How many odour complaints were raised against a particular asset in the last 3 years?)
Figure 2: InfoAsset solution interface
Risk Assessment and Rehabilitation Prioritisation
InfoAsset offers a highly customisable, step-by-step approach in setting up Likelihood of Failure (LOF) and Consequence of Failure (COF) factors from a wide array of data as input.
Risk assessments can be configured to the organisation’s framework and tolerance. This is done by defining the risk analysis criteria and the LOF and COF factors to include in the analysis scope.
Figure 3: Understand your organisation’s risk exposure and run mitigation strategy scenarios.
Rehabilitation planning in InfoAsset centres on a logical decision tree. The decision tree can be designed to conform to the organisation’s standard decision process and leverage any datasets and analysis results in the data interrogation workflow to arrive to a rehab recommendation.
Figure 4: Build your organisation’s decision logic in InfoAsset’s Rehab Planning tool.
Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA)
The LCCA tool in InfoAsset assists in developing sound, long-term, and cost-efficient rehabilitation program by evaluating the total cost of asset ownership. It balances capital expenditure against operations, maintenance, and risk costs in addition to budgets and planning settings. InfoAsset daylights the most economic long-term asset strategy whilst ensuring agreed levels of service are met.
Figure 5: Do the right intervention action, on the right asset, at the right time with InfoAsset.
[1] Australian Infrastructure Audit 2019, An Assessment of Australia’s Future Infrastructure Needs, https://www.infrastructureaustralia.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-09/audit_water_pp598-537.pdf
[2] Queensland Audit Office 2016, Forecasting long-term sustainability of local government, Report 2: 2016-17, https://www.qao.qld.gov.au/sites/default/files/reports/forecasting_long-term_sustainability_of_local_government.pdf