Strategic Asset Management

Optimise maintenance and rehabilitation interventions in irrigation districts.

Machine learning gauges asset maintenance to minimise costs

Like all companies engaged in water processing and delivery, irrigation districts have large asset bases. The advent of irrigation modernisation programmes means an increase in assets, and therefore maintenance costs, too. Meanwhile, water consumption revenue is in decline.

A new approach of cost optimisation through an asset’s life cycle is imperative. The old way of replacing an asset at the end of its life is no longer economically viable. Reacting to assessments or unserviceability field reports isn’t sufficient.

Strategic asset management ensures asset maintenance interventions occur at the right time, keeping or returning resources to the required performance and maintaining service levels.

Repairs or refurbishing to required levels rather than “as new” optimises costs, with interventions based on knowledge of each asset’s life cycle cost curve. Repairing a slightly deteriorated asset is usually less costly than after its condition further worsens.

Person checking the status of their assets on a tablet

ADASA's expertise is in providing the information that facilitates strategic asset management. We can help companies with each of the following steps:

Define service and risk levels.
Collect asset information.
Define classes of assets and standard lifecycles, and how service levels deteriorate as a percentage of the asset’s remaining life.
Identify all intervention types; acquisition, maintenance, performance monitoring, and disposal, plus provide the costs and their effects on service level improvements.
Assess the condition of all assets and their replacement value.
Make an assessment of an asset's failure costs and any inherent risks.

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There are several excellent tools to automate the last step, optimising spend and providing options for some wishing to minimise costs. Without the hard preliminary work of data collection and categorisation, they are of little use. This is where ADASA's experts and experience achieve the desired outcomes of risk and service levels.

For example, we help our clients change the cycle of annual expenditure blowouts — with no end in sight — to a confident prediction of capital expenditure over 30 and 50 years. We identify a range of funding alternatives and pricing mechanisms to help them move forward.

Machine learning also provides a different approach, more agile and targeted, to asset base expenditure and service level differentiation across assets. The objective is a reduced asset profile that is both affordable and service-appropriate, an outcome agreed with, and to benefit of, irrigators.

We look at all past asset maintenance to identify what is impacting service levels and find activities that may be either expensive or unnecessary that may lead to savings when scrapped while maintaining service levels.

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Benefits

Reducing asset costs and risks and improving customer service by identifying asset lifecycles, conditions and valuations.
Optimising maintenance and rehabilitation interventions to achieve corporate objectives for level of service and risk.