Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Managing Underground Assets

Good day and welcome to Transforming Asset Management, our regular video series where we discuss key asset management topics and share tips drawn from our collective experience in industry. David Horstman's with me again today. And today we're talking about those underground assets, which by their very nature are out of sight and too often out of mind. For our utility, organizations who are operating under a stricter regulatory environment, AM practices are probably a bit more advanced. But for our local governments, particularly with their stormwater asset class, quite often we're seeing this be the forgotten asset class and the complexities involved with the large network underground and the cost of inspecting that, can make it a very difficult problem. So how can organizations break it down into smaller pieces and, manage these assets more effectively? Oh, thanks, Wayne. Excellent question. And I must say great to be back on another episode with you as well. So look, at at the end of the day, you're quite right about the local government context. I think most people know that stormwater assets, generally speaking, are the poor cousin when it comes to data. But look, it is possible to be smart and be tactical in terms of how you manage both the risks and the costs associated with the network. Three key things that we would suggest. First and foremost, you need to develop a criticality framework. Yeah. So the reality is you're going to have to inspect your network. There's no other way ultimately of collecting reliable data but to prioritize that developing a criticality framework focused on the risks of those assets failing is your fundamental starting point. Once you've got that criticality framework developed, that then allows you to think about allocating an annual budget for the inspections. So it doesn't need to be a huge portion of your network, but basically it means that you can do a small portion of your network every single year, but focus and prioritize those that are the highest criticality. And ultimately, that gets you to the third point, which is as you're collecting that data, it gives you both the ability to identify assets at risk of failure, but also that really good condition data allows you to extrapolate to the rest of your network. So using common attributes around pipe type, size, time that it was installed, catchment, subcatchment, all of that allows you to extrapolate and make good life cycle judgements on those assets still to be inspected. Yeah. Sure. So that's from coming from like the, I guess, the proactive data and extrapolating from that. What about other information sources that organizations might have, like handover information from contractors, reactive inspections, are they able to utilize some of this information to sort of broader network analysis? Absolutely. Really good point. Yeah. So in addition to that proactive inspection program that you have, keep in mind that you're also getting CCTV, CCTV data from other purposes. And in particular, those reactive inspections, those instances where you've had to attend to a pipe and it requires CCTV, that's really powerful data again that can be combined with those proactive inspections. Excellent suggestion, mate. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So develop your criticality framework, and progressively, analyze your network from there based on that. So, thanks for joining us on Transforming AM again. We hope to see you here for the next video coming soon.