PERFORMANCE INDICATORS FOR WATER AND WASTEWATER UTILITIES

The QualServe Quality Programs and the American Water Works Research Foundation (AwwaRF) are co-sponsoring a project to develop a small number of high-level performance indicators for water and wastewater utilities. This paper describes the status of that project, the process involved in identifying the indicators, and a review process from other utility representatives for feedback on the proposed performance indicators. The workshop group comprised of managers and executives from 26 utilities and consultants who participated in two workshops at Denver, Colorado in December 2001 (Workshop I) and May 2002 (Workshop II). Workshop I involved a review of the outcomes from over 300 respondents to a survey sent in April 2002. The second workshop with the same participants was held in May 2002 to consider all comments received and to make final recommendations on a suite of high-level indicators to help utilities gauge their performance relative to others and to track their performance over time. The outcomes of Workshop II will be completed in July 2002. The outcomes of this research study will be used by the QualServe Benchmarking Clearinghouse to develop a database system to collect, validate, and report these data on an annual basis.