Recently, we got a great question from a maintenance supervisor: Should maintenance (including condition assessment) be skipped in favor of simply replacing a pipeline? The prospect of spending tens of thousands of dollars in maintenance on a pipeline that is well into its service life for much of its length is daunting. So is raising millions of dollars to replace the line and manage its replacement.
The same questions could then be posed for all large capital assets: “Why keep them? When should they just be replaced?”
The decision depends on multiple, often competing objectives. One approach (a common one) is to let the loudest, most intrusive matter get the resources, then clean up when necessary. That’s the approach that yields 20-MG sewage spills into a creek and storage tank ruptures. We advocate and support a different approach to difficult decisions. It’s based on some simple principles:
Make decisions repeatable and transparent. Establish the bases for decisions (define objectives and the metrics that support them), then collect and document the supporting information involved. If there’s a question about the decision, be able to roll back through the process quickly and efficiently. It helps with boards of directors, casual conversations with customers, and a good night’s sleep.
Integrate risk assessment. Though we humans are notoriously poor at off-the-cuff risk assessment, structured and standardized risk assessments translated into dollars lost work very well. Here at EEI, we’ve independently calculated the cost of people in one town sickening from water storage tank contamination, and the results are incredibly clarifying for the agency. Risk assessment is the reigning champion of decision-making tools - though it must be done well.
Adopt standards from other fields when needed. In building one decision support system for an agency, we adopted the O&M valuation practices from private plant operations practices. Their factory operations standards and rules of thumb include O&M levels necessary for minimum future operations and for exiting the business. We used this to show the agency they were investing in their plant O&M as if they were planning on leaving the business soon. And they increased their O&M funding as a result.
Ewers Engineering makes the process easy for our clients. We develop detailed, realistic failure risk models that establish a clear path to understanding the benefit of complex capital assets throughout their life cycles. Our work develops decision support tools that provide repeatable, transparent, flexible, and systematic bases for decision-making around large capital asset life cycle investments. Their mathematical models allows us to provide graphics for presentation for risks, urgency, consequences, benefits, and failure likelihoods in maps, graphs, and logic diagrams for easy communication with boards of directors with a range of technical expertise.
They are oriented to answer these deceptively simple questions:
When should a pipeline asset be removed from service?
What is the maximum annual budget for maintenance activities, including condition assessment?
What is the best option for any particular capital asset: repair, replacement, rehabilitation, or refrain (do nothing)?
If you're asking the same questions or think that someone is going to ask these questions soon, consider developing a risk model as the first step to building a decision support tool.
Graphics make metrics so much more accessible for all levels of education! We use GIS in nearly all our projects because of this.