The Forum was led by Leon Patterson of the Institute of Public Works Engineering Australia (IPWEA), who delivered the keynote address. The panel session was moderated by Chris Adams of Queensland Urban Utilities (QUU), and also featured QUU’s Shane Makin, and Andy McLean from the National Utility Locating Contracting Association (NULCA).
After Mr Patterson’s keynote address, the speakers outlined their roles in asset management, and the floor was then opened to delegates to pose questions on contemporary issues affecting Australian assets.
Asset management today
Mr Patterson’s keynote address focused on the current state of play in the field of asset management. He began by highlighting the public view of water assets. Mr Patterson said, “They turn on their taps and expect water to flow; they flush and expect water to disappear. These aspects of day-to-day life are taken for granted, and it’s not until something stops working that the public realises the importance of their assets.”
Mr Patterson said this is because, to most, they are out of sight and out of mind. Moreover, people quite often don’t know exactly what assets they are using until they fail.
The current process of asset management is to ‘patch things up’ when they fail, but this is usually too late to prevent the failure in the first place. Furthermore, the patching up is usually so little or insignificant that any progressive failure may not be noticed until it’s too late.
However, Mr Patterson believes we can manage our assets more effectively by having thorough knowledge of asset conditions, such as when they are due for renewal, and estimated costs.
Mr Patterson highlighted limited resources, personnel and expertise as factors currently holding back management processes. The current focus on operating on short-term budgets also creates an issue, as long-term financial planning is essential to an effective asset management program.
Asset registers
According to Mr Patterson, many asset registers are not being kept up-to-date, and there are often multiple registers for different purposes within an organisation. Councils often have a technical asset register and a financial asset register kept independently that don’t necessarily coordinate with one another. Keeping registers up-to-date can be costly and it requires an ongoing commitment, because all assets have components with different useful lives and these components need to be managed separately.
Mr Patterson said that useful lives and service levels need to be defined, and risk to service delivery needs to be better understood and defined. Councils and communities need to understand what they want and what they can afford, so they understand what services are going to cost to own and operate throughout their lifetime.
The importance of funding
Additionally, funding for management of assets isn’t always a top priority and there’s never enough available funding for all asset-related needs. There is a constant pressure to fund new assets and upgrades, which means degenerative funding is limited. When new assets are added, quite often they are taken onboard by the organisation without consideration of maintenance costs, Mr Paterson said.
Funding gaps can lead to failures. If assets aren’t renewed when required, they are pushed beyond their useful life and they fail – which is particularly common with underground assets. When high levels of maintenance are required, low levels of service can be the result.
Many responsibilities are passed down from other tiers of government. Local water utilities are in a good position to know the life of their assets because they understand the limitations of their systems and are better able to forecast affordable, renewable profiles. Local water utilities know their communities through maintenance and upgrade requests and so they’re better able to forecast future demand by looking at growth and other demand drivers.
Lower cost renewals can help to manage the gap and help bring renewing forward. Local water utilities work with communities to help find levels of service that are required, and can be afforded. Asset plans and service delivery can help plan for asset renewing before it is too late. By knowing what assets exist, how much they cost, how long they last, what services need to be provided, and when the asset need to be renewed, services can continue to be provided into the future. This is sustainable asset management.
Asset management panel
Shane Makin, QUU
Mr Makin outlined what asset management means for QUU. As the water distributor-retailer of Brisbane and Ipswich City Councils, and Lockyer Valley, Scenic Rim and Somerset Regional Councils, QUU manages substantial amounts of new assets from areas of high growth that are only two to three years old, as well as assets in other areas that are over 100 years old. He said the challenge they are faced with is dealing with five asset management approaches, five different asset registers, five different levels of information and five different workplace cultures. If that was not a big enough challenge for the utility, six months after being established they were hit by the Queensland floods.
The management strategy of QUU is broken into renewable planning and maintenance strategy. Mr Makin said QUU plans its maintenance works by prioritising assets and customer service needs. They also consider industry standards, and look at archived facilities like those of Melbourne Water.
Andy Mclean, NULCA
Mr McLean explained the role of surveyors and service locators in asset management, stating there is a lot of misrepresentation on the services they supply. NULCA is in charge with supplying information on current structures in the field, and identifying strikes and conflicts with existing infrastructure. NULCA works by viewing historical records of a field to see if an asset can be expected in a field environment. If there is historical evidence to indicate there may be a structure in the vicinity, they apply service location techniques to actually physically identify it. Service location gives an indication of alignment of asset location, which is followed by surveying, and lastly validation, which looks at what is represented through surveying to make sure it represents information that can be used for a purpose.
Questions posed
As the floor was opened to questions, the panellists answered a wide range of questions, from what the key challenges in asset management are, to what is done with information obtained from service location, and how the issue of funding can be tackled to bring rehabilitation into the focus over new projects.
The dialogue between the panellists and audience members proved lively and showcased the many strong opinions held by those in the industry on the importance of asset management. Anecdotes were shared by those on both side of the stage, with engaging tales of delegate and speaker involvement in asset management strategies in Australasia.
Following the session the feedback from delegates and attendees was overwhelmingly positive, and discussions on the importance of asset management continued over the remainder of the event.
