Florida Utilities Establish a Successful Statewide Benchmarking Initiative

Since 2001, the American Water Works Association (AWWA) and the Water Environment Federation (WEF) have collaborated on a national benchmarking effort that focuses on 22 high level indicators of utility performance. These “benchmarking performance indicators” have been collected in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2006 as part of the QualServe initiative. After the survey of 2006, utilities in Florida expressed an interest in collaborating on the development of a regional Florida Benchmarking Initiative as a next step by working with and learning from select Performance Indicators (PIs). The Florida Water Environment Association (FWEA) sponsored the creation of this initiative to assess the Qualserve measure definitions and formulas to increase the comparability of performance indicators from one utility to another considering conditions specific to Florida and to expand the base of indicators to provide actionable information. The participants in this initiative have grown to 11 of the 16 Florida municipalities that participated in the 2006 AWWA Qualserve survey with over 30 individuals participating. The leaders of Florida Benchmarking Initiative worked closely with AWWA headquarters in Denver, Colorado in developing this effort.Florida is counted as among the first of seven similar benchmarking workshops/initiatives from December 2006 through November 2007, ranging from the Carolinas to California. For each workshop, a custom report was generated for just the participating utilities similar to the report submitted the benchmarking survey.Specifically, this paper describes the efforts taken to achieve the ultimate goal of continuous improvement of utility performance in the State of Florida using benchmarking as a tool.