Weston & Sampson helps our clients plan for the future by staying ahead of repair and maintenance schedules and prioritizing improvements through the development of Capital Improvement Plans (CIP). CIPs assess a wide variety of asset variables, including condition, history, hydraulic model scenario outputs, plans for future expansion, paving schedules, and adjacent CIPs on other utilities. This information helps to prioritize expenditures, maximizing the impact to asset life cycles and return on investment.
While these plans are essential, the compiling, management, and assessment of data into an actionable plan can be time consuming and costly. Additionally, unforeseen circumstances can impact plans, so the regular reassessment of priority assets is necessary.
Weston & Sampson uses Esri’s ArcGIS Online platform to shorten the preliminary development of the CIP. By centralizing an organization’s assets into a universally accessible digital twin, we begin laying the foundation for a responsive, web-based CIP application that grows with changing asset qualities, such as age, main breaks history, paving schedules, and cost. Weston & Sampson’s CIP Viewer/Generator is designed to respond as asset attributes are updated, so organizations at the start of their inventorying process can benefit. Maintaining a flexibility of purpose is important and our application allows users to modify variables at both the global and individual asset levels allowing for tailored cost estimates. Additionally, consideration is given to new design or expanded construction by allowing users to include a set of proposed assets without editing authoritative data.
The open-source nature of the data in ArcGIS Online lend to easy integration with third-party asset management and work order software. These are often used for the collection of data on things like water main breaks and other data critical to the assessment of an asset’s viability.
Customized scripts periodically examine these inputs, calculate a cost per asset, and prioritize them based on a normalized score that is consistent with the approach of our team of engineers. For every asset, the algorithm includes an assessment of proximal assets. As part of this task, assets of priority scoring are assessed based on their proximity to other assets. This allows prioritization to be modified based on the condition of proximal assets and inserts a large measure of efficiency to a proposed list of assets.
The summary dashboard portion of the application allows users to look at the prioritized list of assets and offers a set of filters to review conditions, including a budget filter that will take an input at budget number and display a list of assets of highest priority under that cap in an interactive map and table. Each variable affecting scoring is stored with the asset list so that users can see precisely what factors are influencing the score. Weights can be applied to individual variables that will redistribute priorities based on whichever factors the user chooses to accentuate. A final list of assets is available for download as an excel spreadsheet for finer tuning and sharing.
This application does more than simply provide a list of assets ripe for repair or replacement; it provides justification for their consideration as a capital expense and allows users to tailor their approach as their unique circumstance dictates. Since this solution exists entirely in ArcGIS online, it integrates directly with all other platform components expanding the return on investment in GIS.