Data Integration- Jefferson County’s Journey to Compile, Track, and Report on Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

Jefferson County Alabama currently owns, operates and maintains approximately 3,100 miles of gravity sewer, 176 pump stations, and 7 major WWTPs. However, before 1996, the County only owned and operated 570 miles of trunk sewers and 33 pump stations. All other assets were owned and operated by 21 municipalities. A 1996 Consent Decree required the County to take over all of these systems and to eliminate overflows.Many of these systems had not been maintained properly and were not constructed to proper standards. In subsequent years, the County spent a significant amount of money making system improvements and, with a downturn in the economy went into bankruptcy in 2011. The significant reduction in capital funding and the need to manage the system through the bankruptcy created a unique situation that motivated the County to take a customized Asset Management approach based on early successes and measuring outcomes to continue to improve the system and address overflows during both wet and dry weather.Simple data analytics reveal basic insights; more sophisticated analytics, applied to data that has been pooled into a “data lake” with data from external and enterprise sources, unearth deeper insights that will help water and wastewater utilities optimize their performance.Because of the growing volume, complexity and strategic importance of asset management data, it is no longer desirable or even feasible for each departmental unit/division/function within a utility to manage this data by itself, or build its own data analytics capability. To get the most out of the new data resources, utilities are creating dedicated data groups that are potentially embedded within the core asset management program team that consolidate data collection, aggregation and analytics. Therefore, an additional responsibility of the asset management program is for making data and insights available across various organizational functions and business units.Recently, advances in technology have revolutionized data and performance reporting in that users (with limited IT development expertise) can perform data mining and develop high impact visuals for performance reporting.Jefferson County has implemented Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) to track and report key performance indicators.