Lemons to Lemonade: How Kansas City Water Is Using Asset Management Principles to Assure the Quality of Its Data

摘要

Like many utilities, KC Water is in the process of implementing an asset management program that strives to provide the most value to both internal and external customers. Unlike most utilities, however, KC Water is currently dealing with the mandates of a $4 billion Federal Consent Decree and the projects associated with it. Literally thousands of assets are being analyzed, designed and improved by hundreds of consultants and contractors as part of this program. From an engineering, construction and project management perspective alone, the program presents a significant challenge to KC Water. While most of the attention paid to the program has tended to focus on these aspects, another challenging and significant aspect was not adequately considered in its early days: what to do with all of that data that represents and codifies all of the work on the physical infrastructure? How should it be captured? What information was critical to end users? What was the vehicle that would make sure that all of the quality physical work being done on the infrastructure was reflected in accurate informative data that could be entered, interpreted and utilized by multiple stakeholders? How would the department assure that work for the program was better coordinated with day to day operations and maintenance activities by staff who are separated from one another in the Kansas City organizational hierarchy? This manuscript describes how a multi-stakeholder team, representing a variety of perspectives and business needs and unified around the concepts and goals of asset management, worked together to develop a data application to answer these questions. In addition, it illustrates how the approach to solving these problems continues to develop and now addresses an ever expanding list of business needs beyond its original intent.