RMWD approves enterprise asset management system

The Rainbow Municipal Water District will be obtaining an enterprise asset management system.

A 4-0 Rainbow board vote Jan. 26, with Bob Lucy having resigned prior to the meeting, determined that the request for proposals process would not produce a significant benefit to the district and authorized Rainbow general manager Tom Kennedy to enter into a contract with Infor Public Sector, Inc., for $49,436.28.

"It's a pretty important system to have," Kennedy said.

The process for developing Rainbow's strategic plan included identifying key focus areas, and proactive asset management was one of those areas.

An enterprise asset management system includes a complete data base of all assets including information about material, type, age, and condition of the assets. The system also includes mechanisms for planning and scheduling required maintenance activities and for recording asset condition over time. The system also tracks labor and other expenditures on various asset classes.

"That's going to be an important system for us," Kennedy said.

Kennedy noted that the district has approximately 100,000 assets. "This will be a comprehensive system to track all of those and to make sure we keep our maintenance system on track," he said.

Most of Rainbow's assets are part of the district's water distribution and sewer collection systems including pipes, pumps, tanks, and valves. Those assets are currently documented in the district's geographic information system (GIS) data base. The GIS data base does not include other assets such as Rainbow's headquarters site and other buildings, computers, trucks, equipment, and the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system.

Obtaining information on all of Rainbow's assets will be part of the process of developing the enterprise asset management system. The quality of the GIS data will be reviewed before it is integrated into the enterprise asset management system while the documentation of non-GIS assets will take approximately four to five months to complete. A set of data quality standards will be established to ensure that the data bases remain intact.

After the assets are loaded into the system, the work at the district involving the assets can be tracked. Each employee will enter their daily activities into the enterprise asset management system and record all work against a work order, and each work order will be linked to a specific asset or group of assets. That will allow a determination of the labor costs for specific assets or groups of assets, and "virtual assets" not related to a physical asset but to administrative functions will also be tracked.

The factors which influenced Rainbow's choice of Infor Public Sector, Inc., as the vendor included cost, compatibility with Rainbow's existing information technology infrastructure and capability, Cloud access, system flexibility, staff familiarity, and vendor capability.

The Software As a Service agreement with Infor allows 52 named users to have full access to the fully-hosted system which requires no information technology requirements at the Rainbow facilities other than a web browser. The $49,436.28 covers software, hosting, and support services and is a year-to-year contract with no long-term commitment.