Asset Management: Ten Years After Commitment at Eastern Municipal Water District

In late 1999, Eastern Municipal Water District's (EMWD) Board of Directors and Senior Managers recognized the importance of asset management in providing service to its customers and directed staff to implement a comprehensive asset management program based on best practices. The District recognized early on that total organization commitment was necessary to achieve success in asset management and formed a Leadership Team consisting of senior managers and department heads from Operations and Maintenance, Finance, Engineering, Information Systems, Human Resources and Purchasing and Contracts. The Leadership Team provided general direction to the Project Team tasked with completing the multiple components of asset management. The Project Team identified business process needs associated with life cycle replacement, warehouse and inventory control, purchasing, maintenance strategies, information management, engineering and charge account codes.Progress to date includes full implementation of maintenance work management at all District facilities, totaling 2.0 billion dollars in assets. These assets include four sewage treatment facilities, 46 sewage lift stations, 1,800 miles of collection lines, 2,000 miles of potable distribution lines, 80 booster stations, two brackish water desalination plants, two potable water filtration plants, and 300 miles of recycled water distribution pipelines. EMWD has completed populating the asset hierarchies on over 90% of its assets based on parent/child relationships and has assigned criticality of its assets based on water and sewer service delivery.The integration between the maintenance software, financial system, timekeeping, and GIS software's has been completed. EMWD's facility safety audit program has also been revised to utilize the Maximo software to identify, track, and resolve potential risks. EMWD's progress in asset management has been recognized by the United States General Accounting Office in its March 2004 report: “Water Infrastructure, Comprehensive Asset Management Has Potential to Help Utilities Better Identify Needs and Plan Future Investments.”