Louisville Water transforms asset management with Oracle
The 160-year-old water company is taking advantage of the latest technologies to transition into a leading innovator among water utilities.
“As we manage a billion dollars’ worth of assets across our portfolio, Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management has provided a strong foundation for a data-driven asset program. We now have the data and visibility we need to forecast asset cost, perform predictive maintenance before failure incidents, and ultimately extend the life of our assets.”
Business challenges
Louisville Water Company (LWC) has always prided itself on delivering the highest-quality service to its customers. With an eye on efficiency and service excellence, LWC sought to completely reinvent its asset management program to reduce manual workloads. It also wanted to eliminate paper-based processes that hampered employee productivity, and to ensure continuity and reliability of water service to its customers.
Why Louisville Water Company Chose Oracle
A longtime Oracle customer, the Louisville Water Company went live on Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing in 2017 after an award-winning implementation project. Because of its strong relationship with Oracle and success with Oracle’s utility-specific products, LWC chose to implement Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management as the foundation for its asset management modernization. In the spirit of innovation, LWC was one of the first movers to the latest version of the software, version 2.2.
“During phase one of the project, the Oracle team adjusted to align with our project cadence to ensure we were getting the attention and support needed as an early adopter project. By phase two, we were rockin’ and rollin’, giving feedback to the Oracle team on requirements or additional needs, and the team addressed them quickly,” says Obe Everett, director of program management and business systems support at Louisville Water Company.
Results
After a successful go live, Louisville Water Company is enjoying a solution that works seamlessly with Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing, and other Oracle Utilities products. LWC is already seeing efficiency benefits due to this interoperability.
“Oracle Utilities WAM is the enterprise platform for our asset program. It provides all of the critical data across our assets. The field crews need the right information at the right time to do their work, WAM provides that. Each asset we touch, we’re tracking that work. Any time a field rep completes work, that information is automatically pushed from WAM to populate their timecards. That’s a major efficiency gain right there,” says Everett.
Through this project and the new asset management technology, LWC has developed predictive indicators for asset replacement needs and can reliably forecast maintenance costs. It can accurately compare asset replacement costs to asset maintenance costs to make data-driven repairs versus replace decisions. Data captured by Oracle Utilities WAM allows LWC to predict and mitigate failures before they occur, improving system reliability and allowing LWC to continually optimize maintenance programs intended to reduce failures.
LWC is using asset hierarchy to manage both assets and systems of assets. Additionally, LWC has enhanced energy management and is now better able to track costs tied to assets. For instance, LWC can analyze energy usage and costs across facilities.
Oracle Utilities WAM processes have significantly improved LWC’s ability to respond to field incidents. Field users can now capture current valve status at the time of an incident. This data capture is further supported by the WAM-GIS integration, which allows valve position data captured in Oracle Utilities WAM to be rendered in a map view in near real time. With this capability, LWC can visually monitor the current status of the water distribution system and affected customers.
Additionally, Oracle Utilities WAM allows LWC to tap asset operational data to capture cathodic pipeline protection, rectifier, and test station readings. These readings help monitor the effectiveness of cathodic protection applications.
Along with LWC’s mobile workforce application, implemented as part of this asset management project, the new solutions have empowered LWC’s workforce with cross-application, end-to-end analytics to foster predictive and operational metrics for process improvement and error prevention.
Soon after the launch of its asset and mobility program overhaul, LWC realized major improvements, including Improved on-time arrival for customer appointments by 1% to 97% (despite a 226% increase in appointments made). It also reduced manual data entry by 530 hours per month and increased work order throughput by 23%, And importantly, the water utility continued to deliver on the customer service excellence it is known for, while improving the employee experience