For many Cityworks clients, the primary focus is managing the daily work and ongoing costs associated with maintaining the organization’s infrastructure. But what about using the data being collected through everyday work to generate a more in-depth view of system health? That is where the Cityworks Asset Analytics toolset comes into play. This group of tools is useful for analyzing the historical data maintained in a system so managers can start planning and making decisions regarding future maintenance.
The Asset Analytics toolset was first introduced in Cityworks 2011, and since then has been continually enhanced. This toolset provides robust, out-of-box tools for analysis of infrastructure lifetime costs, condition, and maintenance history. The Asset Analytics tools include maintenance scoring, condition scoring, heat mapping, and an overall Asset Analytics page with a matrix view of lifetime activity and costs.
Maintenance Scoring
Maintenance scoring provides a method to identify infrastructure assets that have required more maintenance but do not easily allow for inspections to assess condition. This is particularly helpful when dealing with contained infrastructure such as water distribution mains. Implementing maintenance scoring is simple and only requires the administrator to enter a maintenance score on the work order template. Organizations have the flexibility to apply their own scoring and scale based on internal work priorities. For example, in one organization the maintenance scores for various work activities may be equal across all work activities. Meanwhile, in another organization, activities that are more expensive or indicate possible future failure would have a higher maintenance score, while regular preventive maintenance activities would have a lower maintenance score. In both scenarios, the higher maintenance score would be an indication of a problem area or a level of ongoing maintenance which exceeds the norm for that asset type or area.
Each time the work activity is applied to an asset, the maintenance score is applied and a cumulative score is stored in the Cityworks database. This information can then be viewed graphically using the “Maintenance Scoring” option on the Condition tool on the Cityworks map. With the connection between the maintenance score, work history, and the GIS, decision makers have the tools to identify why particular assets of the infrastructure require more maintenance than others.
Using the Year slide bar, users can review the accumulation of maintenance history at different locations over time. In addition, by using the Score slide bar scores can be filtered out to isolate the higher scores and identify areas that represent ongoing issues. Once the desired segments are represented, users can create a selection set for additional activities, such as more aggressive preventive maintenance or replacement.
Condition Scoring
The second component in this toolset is condition scoring, which identifies an asset’s condition or health at a specific point in time. This functionality is configured using custom inspections and allows organizations to weigh each condition observation and score each condition result. As the inspections are carried out in the field, the corresponding scores are attached to the respective assets in the Cityworks database, along with the option to write the most current score to an attribute field for each asset in the GIS. This makes sharing the data with other applications much easier.
Just like with maintenance scoring, the condition scores are displayed through the Condition tool in the Cityworks map. As the tool runs, it identifies the assets of the specified feature layer and displays the historical condition scores. The difference between maintenance scoring and condition scoring is that condition scoring, rather than displaying a numerical score on the map, displays a heat map to represent the density of the scores in the area. Just as with the maintenance scoring though, scores can be filtered and attribute information displayed.
With the heat map option, managers can isolate the worst condition scores and identify where the highest density of those scores are occurring. This helps staff identify trends in the system, locate areas where condition may be decreasing more rapidly, and coordinate the information with the bigger picture provided by the GIS.
In both instances, using these tools within the organization’s GIS increases the power of the analysis. It allows organizations to pull in additional information for greater insight into the cause of problems, as well as to identify trends based on the spatial locations and networks. The power of these views within the GIS is so beneficial that Cityworks added a Heat Map Manager, which applies the heat map utility to any saved search within Cityworks. This lets organizations identify hot zones or regions within their systems where issues occur more frequently, and quickly providing managers with a view of areas to prioritize upcoming CIP work or increased preventive maintenance.
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