Transforming Asset Lifecycle Management Through Data Integration and Business Intelligence
How a new digital asset management planning platform is helping Southern California’s Water Replenishment District make impactful, data-backed decisions more efficiently.
At a Glance
The Water Replenishment District (WRD) wanted to take a more proactive, data-driven approach to its asset management program to maximize the value of its vast asset data and enable more strategic, cost-effective business planning.
Hazen helped the agency develop a digital software application to aggregate and analyze its myriad data sources in one dynamic, user-friendly platform that provides a comprehensive view of asset health and performance.
This interactive business intelligence tool is empowering WRD to identify potential asset risks before they become critical and to optimize maintenance, rehabilitation, and replacement schedules.
By streamlining its asset management planning, WRD is ensuring sustainable advanced water treatment operations and effective budget allocation both immediately and into the future.
The Water Replenishment District (WRD) in Southern California manages and protects groundwater resources for a massive service area that includes 43 cities, four million residents, and 420 square miles of Los Angeles County. With this sweeping area of responsibility comes an equally vast array of water treatment assets—critical facilities and equipment that must be monitored, maintained, and optimized to ensure the availability of reliable, high-quality local water.
Recognizing its asset management program needed to be modernized, WRD turned to Hazen to explore a more proactive, data-driven approach to tracking the state of its assets and prioritizing future repair and replacement projects. While the initial engagement involved a standard condition and risk assessment at one of WRD’s advanced water treatment facilities, the project evolved into the district-wide adoption of a new centralized, comprehensive decision support tool.
This new Hazen-built, custom Asset Management Planning (AMP) BI application—created using Microsoft Power BI—has done more than empower WRD to streamline operations and make better-informed decisions. It has helped the agency take full ownership of its asset management program, positioning it for more cost-effective, sustainable system operations for years to come.
Sean Pour PhD, PE is Hazen’s West Region Asset Management Lead and specializes in equipping clients with strategies and tools for more proactive, effective asset management and long-term operational success.
Related Topics:
Top Photo: WRD’s Leo J. Vander Lans Advanced Water Treatment Facility, where Hazen began helping the agency implement a new approach to its asset management program.
With this custom AMP BI application, Hazen helped take WRD from using static, siloed data to leveraging a comprehensive dashboard featuring real-time insights, dynamic forecasting, and data-driven recommendations.
Breaking Down Data Silos
As part of conducting the initial condition and risk assessment at WRD’s Leo J. Vander Lans Advanced Water Treatment Facility, Hazen was also tasked with creating a mechanism to translate on-the-ground insights from the plant into timely, dynamic condition scores.
“WRD didn’t want a static product,” said Sean Pour PhD, Hazen’s West Region Asset Management Lead. “The team was looking to maximize the value of the collected asset data and use it to predict and plan asset lifecycle strategies, all with as few manual processes as possible.”
The three-stage advanced water treatment process at the Leo J. Vander Lans facility includes a microfiltration backwash system, a reverse osmosis system (pictured above), and ultraviolet disinfection with advanced oxidation. Photo Credit: Water Replenishment District
This was the inception of the AMP BI application, which was seamlessly integrated with WRD’s Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), AMP database, and real-time data collected in the field. Consolidating this diverse data into one digital platform was the first step toward making it actionable—a foundational process that Pour says should not be overlooked.
“A lot of utilities are suffering from data silos,” said Pour. “What this project accomplished was breaking down those data silos when it came to WRD’s key asset information. There’s so much value in being able to visualize all of it in one place.”
Transforming Data Sources into Business Insights
Consolidating WRD’s asset data alone was a major step forward in improving efficiencies and streamlining workflows across the agency’s operations, with the BI dashboard application serving as the platform that integrates WRD’s critical databases into a unified system. Repair and replacement activities, condition assessments, and deterioration modeling flow directly into the dashboard, which automatically updates based on these inputs and customizable aging and deterioration curves.
“Every time the team opens up the tool, they’re seeing the most current information for that asset,” said Pour.
Asset management algorithms and analytics embedded in the platform are then applied to this vast, consistently refreshed data, generating highly accurate, real-time condition scores that provide a reliable basis for asset planning decisions.
“WRD wanted to pinpoint its high-risk areas that needed funding to be focused on,” said Pour. “This platform represents a more proactive, data- and condition-driven approach to help distribute funding more effectively.”
The AMP BI application also provides WRD with a range of features for exploring and analyzing its data, including drilldowns, filtering, sorting, and roll-ups. Results are visualized through user-friendly dashboards (below), reports, and other interactive tools to help WRD make more informed business decisions and easily share results with other stakeholders.
“We have found the dynamic forecasting and data-driven recommendations to be invaluable tools in our efforts to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and predict asset lifecycle investments.”
Jessica Koop, Senior Engineer with WRD
A Data-Informed Path Forward
Upon seeing the immense value of the AMP BI application in its initial implementation, WRD soon adopted the software tool in a phased approach at its two other advanced water treatment facilities. The tool has become an integral part of daily plant operations, with comprehensive training serving as a key part of staff development.
It has also become increasingly vital to WRD’s long-term business planning, supporting better-informed choices about rehabilitation and replacement needs and guiding the annual fiscal year budgeting process, all while saving staff time and resources across its facilities.
As WRD looks ahead to continuously improving the quality of its source data and exploring integrations of artificial intelligence into the platform’s analysis capabilities, Pour says that he’s proud to see the confidence with which WRD has embraced ownership and begun using the platform to meet near- and long-term needs.
“Hazen’s approach has always been to provide our clients with the information, knowledge, tools, and processes they need to help them truly own their asset management programs into the future.”
Long Beach, CA, where WRD’s Leo J. Vander Lans Advanced Water Treatment Facility supplies up to eight million gallons of highly purified recycled water per day to the Alamitos Barrier to protect and replenish the Central Groundwater Basin.
