A Half a Decade of Lessons Learned From the Implementation of Fairfax County's Asset Management System

摘要

The Fairfax County Department of Public Works and Environmental Services, Wastewater Collection Division (WCD) owns, operates and maintains over 3,400 miles of sanitary sewer collection lines spanning over 375 square miles. Unlike many other aging infrastructure systems, the Fairfax County sewer collection system is a truly separate system with no combined sewers. Over the years, WCD has been very successful in maintaining a high level of service with minimal sanitary sewer overflows (SSO) and basement backups. However, WCD found that they were still struggling to quantify their risks, prioritize sewer segments within their sewer system and determine annual budgets required for their capital improvement program (CIP) and O&M program. Five years ago, WCD made the decision to develop a linear asset management program to assist with their day to day decision making processes. The implementation included multiple phases culminating with the final implementation of Innovyze InfoAsset software that was successfully completed in June 2019. The preliminary phases of the project included internal training in order to provide consistent data to the decision support tool. WCD provided NASSCO MACP, PACP and LACP training to their CCTV and asset management staff to standardize inspection data. In addition, WCD implemented WinCan VX for easy coding and importing of inspection data. Once preliminary training was completed, the initial phase of the project included the development of a custom risk assessment tool on the most critical assets within the service area. WCD knew early on that their ultimate goal was to have a GIS based asset management software system. Therefore, the risk assessment tool was custom developed using Python scripting and ESRI ArcMap. The tool included Likelihood of Failure (LoF), Consequence of Failure (CoF) and costing models that were developed after receiving input from numerous stakeholder workshops. The models analyzed over 25 data sources from 5 different organizations both internal and external to WCD. The results of the model output were verified against historic data points for validation of the inputs and outputs. For the next phase, WCD began researching available GIS based asset management software, ultimately deciding to implement Innovyze InfoMaster; which has since become InfoAsset. While the software provides several 'out of the box' solutions, WCD understood the criticality of including the custom risk tools developed under the preliminary phases. This allowed WCD to include development of custom risk tools in the Innovyze scope of work, which helped prevent costly change orders. During the implementation, several rounds of risk sensitivity analysis was completed to ensure that major risk factors were being incorporated into the new InfoAsset software. After the risk models were completed, 9 different decision trees were created in InfoAsset to provide data to the different groups within WCD. Once again, validation and quality control of the decision trees were necessary to confirm results. Final implementation of InfoAsset was completed in June 2019. Throughout this process several unforeseen challenges were overcome; including extensive internal data management, limitations of asset management software, broad stakeholder impacts and coordination, validation of results and coordination of source data input. The presentation will focus on the overall implementation of the asset management system and provide lessons learned on how WCD overcame the unforeseen challenges that arose throughout the project cycle.