How to use analytics to improve water asset management

At the same time, they are up against aging infrastructure, increasing nonrevenue losses, and a declining ability to ensure proper supply and sanitation. There’s an urgent need to cut costs—and a clear opportunity to streamline maintenance in operations.

Learning from the power sector, some water utilities are applying new techniques in advanced analytics to help them better understand their assets’ history, health, and criticality. These insights are allowing them to create an asset-management strategy built around predictive maintenance and target the most important and most in-need assets.

Although unfamiliar given many water utilities’ engineering knowledge, harnessing analytics is more straightforward—and beneficial—than companies might expect. Indeed, companies can see benefits using very little data—structural information and failure history, such as corrective work orders, is all that is required to build predictive models for water assets. And while many executives at utilities believe they won’t see benefits for the first few years, a new maintenance plan will immediately result in savings in two areas