Asset Management - Asset Investment and Bang for the Buck

Most of us are familiar with the ASCE's Infrastructure Report Card. This quadrennial effort evaluates and grades (on a letter scale between A and F) the status of America's public infrastructure, namely the state of the nation's physical assets that support the delivery of public services in eighteen categories. Unfortunately, the most recent average grade across the eighteen categories is" C-" .Simply stated, the public infrastructure asset portfolio that the nation relies on for critical services is in a mediocre state and requires attention.

The nation's drinking water and wastewater assets are graded as "C+" and "D+", respectively, being in mediocre (requiring attention) and poor (at risk) condition. Collectively, drinking water and wastewater systems are predicted to have an investment funding shortfall of nearly $434 billion by 2029. This amount represents the total expenditure necessary to bring the grade of these assets to "A" , which is exceptional and fit for the future.

Sourced from the © 2023 ASCE's 2021 Infrastructure Report Card - Click Image to View Report.

Given the enormous funding gap, this cost is unlikely to be fully passed on to municipal drinking water and wastewater customers. Factors such as affordability and equitable access (rightfully so) play into rate setting. Therefore, it will become increasingly crucial for municipal drinking water and wastewater service providers to maximize the benefit of every dollar spent on asset creation, acquisition, lifecycle interventions, renewal, and disposal activities.

Planning, selecting, optimizing, and bundling asset expenditures to minimize business risk while satisfying organization goals, stakeholder needs, and a myriad of other competing factors is extraordinarily complicated. Moreover, it can tax our brain's numerical processing capacity limits. Fortunately for asset owners, sophisticated computational algorithms have been developed to better evaluate investment decisions' relative costs and benefits, especially when monetizing tangible and intangible multivariates.

Several commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software products are available in the marketplace as stand-alone or cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions; these employ advanced mathematics to model and optimize outcomes that can support the above-noted decision-making effort. In addition, these products are swift and can quickly produce various potential solutions for consideration.

Firstly, it should be noted that the old garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) adage applies when utilizing these decision support software tools. Their complexity, precision, and speed can create an artificially high confidence level in the results. As a result, good money can easily be spent on solutions to poorly defined problems.

The best asset management and investment decisions consider how organizations use their assets to achieve their objectives. Arriving at the best-defined "problem statements" for computational analysis is a process that requires input from business, technical, communication, and other applicable perspectives.

We can support any asset-intensive organization in optimizing its total expenditures (TOTEX) to yield the greatest value and benefit. Feel free to contact me.

George Galambos, PE CAMA CPAM MIAM