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.
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, and 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.
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.
Results
As a result of this project, the Louisville Water Company has already enjoyed improvements in several key areas. It improved on-time arrival for customer appointments by 1% to 97%, despite a 226% increase in the number of appointments made. Additionally, the team has reduced manual data entry by 530 hours per month and increased work order throughput by 23%. And importantly, LWC has continued to deliver on the customer service excellence it is known for, and has improved employee experience.
Through this project and the new asset management technology, the Louisville Water Company now has predictive indicators for asset replacement and can reliably forecast maintenance costs. It can accurately compare asset replacement costs to asset maintenance cost to make data-driven repair versus replace decisions. Data captured by Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management allows the water company to predict and mitigate failures before they occur, improving system reliability and allowing LWC to continually optimize maintenance programs intended to reduce failures.
After implementing Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management, the water company’s ability to respond to field incidents has significantly improved. Field users can now capture current valve status at the time of an incident. This data capture is further supported by integration with geographic information system mapping, which allows valve position data captured in Oracle Utilities WAM to be rendered in a map view in near real time. With this capability, the utility can visually monitor the current status of the water distribution system and affected customers.
Along with its mobile workforce application, implemented as part of this asset management project, the new solutions have equipped the water company’s workforce with cross-application, end-to-end analytics to foster predictive and operational metrics. The utility gains insights to help improve processes and prevent errors.