There is an unprecedented need to manage our deteriorating water infrastructure systems effectively to mitigate the enormous consequences of their premature failure such as loss of service, money, time, damage to other infrastructure, and damage to property. Most of the water utilities understand this need and are implementing asset management approaches and technologies to increase the overall service life of their assets. However, to indeed achieve sustainable water infrastructure systems, there is a requirement to implement a risk-based asset management program which provides a more comprehensive approach to manage these aging assets. A risk-based asset management program assesses and manages the risk of failure associated with the water infrastructure assets and helps water utilities in prioritizing their assets for renewal. This program identifies the critical assets for renewal and saves the money and time invested in the renewal of 'not so critical' assets. This research incorporates an extensive literature and practice review on risk-based asset management of pipes, valves, and hydrants. The risk-based asset management consist of the following four major components: (1) understanding the deterioration modes and mechanisms, (2) implementing risk assessment and management approaches, (3) implementing condition assessment approaches and technologies, and (4) implementing asset renewal approaches and technologies. This research aims to provide enhanced guidelines based on the EPA 10 step asset management program which will help water utilities in developing a risk-based asset management program as well as in improving their existing asset management program. This research combines the in-depth knowledge gained through a state-of-the-art literature review and practice review. The practice review is conducted to capture the real world application of the risk-based asset management through interviews with the water utilities across the united states. This research has also compiled the knowledge gained by already published case studies to provide a more comprehensive overview of the current practices and trend in the risk-based asset management of drinking water pipelines, valves, and hydrants. / Master of Science / America’s drinking water infrastructure is deteriorating and there is an unprecedented need to manage our deteriorating water infrastructure systems effectively to mitigate the enormous impacts of their premature failure such as loss of service, money, time, damage to other infrastructure, and damage to property. In order to achieve sustainable water infrastructure systems, there is a requirement to implement a risk-based asset management program which is a comprehensive approach to manage these aging assets. A risk-based asset management program assesses and manages the risk of failure associated with the water infrastructure assets and helps water utilities in prioritizing their assets for renewal. This program identifies the critical assets for renewal and saves the money and time invested in the renewal of “not so critical” assets. This research aims to provide enhanced guidelines based on the EPA 10 step asset management program which will help water utilities in developing a risk-based asset management program as well as in improving their existing asset management program. This research combines the in-depth knowledge gained through a state-of-the-art literature review and practice review. The practice review is conducted to capture the real-world application of the risk-based asset management through interviews with the water utilities across the united states. This research has also compiled the knowledge gained by already published case studies to provide a more comprehensive overview of the current practices and trend in the risk-based asset management of drinking water pipelines, valves, and hydrants.

No / Several recent empirical tests of the Capital Asset Pricing Model have been based on the conditional relationship between betas and market returns. This paper shows that this method needs reconsideration. An adjusted version of this test is presented. It is then demonstrated that the adjusted technique has similar, or lower, power to the more easily implemented CAPM test of Fama and MacBeth (1973) if returns are normally distributed.

Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT:The research answered the primary research question by defining what business intelligence (BI) platform must be included in Pragma’s asset care centre (ACC) model. Pragma delivers physical asset management services and products with the aim of improving performance of physical assets. These services and products are contained in the ACC model, which is based on Pragma’s AMIP asset management maturity assessment methodology. The current BI platform in the ACC Pack cannot deliver information management to a mature asset management organisation as set out in the AMIP methodology. The research used a questionnaire, based on an extensive literature review, to determine the need for BI within the current user base, and to determine the ideal BI functionality profile delivered inside the ACC model. This proved to be valuable input in defining the BI platform by evaluating the features and capabilities of BI vendors. The quality of information findings highlighted the inadequacy of the current BI platform. The current platform consists of SSRS reports executing directly on the database of the business application, On Key. The concern is that the reports do not conform to the specification. This highlights a misalignment between what the SSRS reports deliver, and what the user expects. The platform is not sufficiently dynamic to allow tailored reports or data analysis to overcome this. Another key finding was that the platform is not delivering the service that the consumer expects. The current platform favours operational users over managerial users. Most of the information quality weaknesses are due to the current platform’s functionality that is stretched beyond its intended purpose. The research found that the current platform is delivering the two main capabilities required from the BI platform, i.e. reporting and MS Office integration. However, this is insufficient because SSRS is unable to deliver on any of the other capabilities present in the BI model. Capabilities like dashboards, collaboration and ad hoc query are key capabilities required by Pragma’s user base. Users require an online platform where they can perform analysis originating from multiple sources. The users responsible for implementing and maintaining the platform must have the functionality to make minor adjustments to the standard reports and the ability to add objects unique to the business environment. The research recommends a hybrid BI platform consisting of SSRS for activity reports, and QlikView for analysis models and adding the complete set of BI capabilities not present in the current platform. QlikTech’s QlikView, one of the leading data discovery tools in the industry, is the BI tool best suited to Pragma’s needs due to its user-friendliness and self-service BI capabilities. This will require an original equipment manufacturers (OEM) partnership between Pragma and QlikTech, with QlikView embedded into On Key as its BI capability. Another recommendation is that Pragma include a data warehouse as part of the On Key deployment. This will allow for analysis across multiple sources and enable completeness of information.

Saskatchewan is facing a current infrastructure deficit, that is the current resources allocated to support its infrastructure are not in line with maintaining the current level of service into the future. This deficit has lead to a common assumption that assets are more likely to fail to provide their required service with age. While obsolescence and other factors may be related to age, the present work set out to investigate the relationship between probability of failure to provide service and expected life of assets, to allow asset managers to create more robust risk management strategies as part of their asset management plans. For the present work, failure is defined as any functional failure where the asset has not met its required level of service. By the functional failure definition, a failure can be any event from a short duration service interruption to catastrophic breakdown of an asset. The purpose of the present work is to look at probability of failure, and not consequence so assets will have two states in the study, fully meeting their required level of service (function) or not meeting their required level of service (functional failure). In the 1970s, two researchers with United Airlines, Nowlan and Heap, completed a study of when assets in aviation were likely to fail. The way failure is defined in their report is in line with the failure definition in the present work. Nowlan and Heap’s work lead to classifying failures into six different patterns. The largest group of failures, known as the F pattern, show that assets were more likely to fail early in their lives. The present work employed a similar study of its assets over a 13 month period to see if similar patterns could be found. To complete the study at the Saskatoon Water Treatment Plant, asset failure data was taken from the City’s Avantis Asset Management System. Failures were broken down by asset type and sub-type based on functionality to observe their age relative to expected life when they failed. The present work determined that the approach was sound and that there was sufficient data with some types of assets to fit to the patterns developed by Nowlan and Heap. The present work shows that likelihood of failure to provide service is not connected with age, and that additional study of the Saskatoon Water Treatment Plant asset’s is required in order to determine exact patterns of probability of failure for each of the assets types. After classifying the failures by each asset type, and accounting for errors in the data caused by the warranty period on assets that are maintained by the contractor, all types of assets were found to have higher occurrences of failure in the early portion of their lives than closer to the end of their expected life. Furthermore defining the shape of each asset type failures made it clear that age-based failure was not dominant. The study results lead to the conclusion that more research should be conducted not only at the Saskatoon WTP but with other infrastructure to better understand when assets are likely to fail to provide service so that probability can be integrated with risk management programs. Lastly this study has shown that it is not correct for asset managers to assume any pattern of failure for their assets without investigation.

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With the increasing cost of new construction projects, keeping the built facilities at acceptable levels of functionality has become a vital and challenging task. This is particularly so for non-residential buildings, such as schools, which are important infrastructure assets that require frequent maintenance and repair of their many components and sub-components. Maintenance and repair jobs, however, involve huge sets of data which contain useful interrelated information about costs, resources, conditions, and productivity. To support decision making at different management levels with respect to the utilization of resources requires the managing, analyzing, and visualizing of these huge amount of data. This thesis presents a simple and inexpensive approach to managing, reporting, and facilitating the visualization of maintenance and repair data for school buildings. The proposed model conveniently integrates widely used spreadsheet software – MS Excel – and Geographic Information System (GIS) software – MS MapPoint. The spreadsheet’s simple and powerful capability of managing data is exploited to design a data warehouse that can facilitate reporting and visualization. The Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language was used to facilitate the integration between the two software systems and to automate the generation of a variety of reports and maps that can show analysis trends, reveal hidden relationships, and support decision making for different management levels. A real-life case study involving two years of maintenance data for 93 schools at the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is used in this thesis to illustrate the development of the model and to demonstrate its simplicity and efficiency. The use of the model as part of an integrated framework for building asset management is also highlighted.

With the increasing cost of new construction projects, keeping the built facilities at acceptable levels of functionality has become a vital and challenging task. This is particularly so for non-residential buildings, such as schools, which are important infrastructure assets that require frequent maintenance and repair of their many components and sub-components. Maintenance and repair jobs, however, involve huge sets of data which contain useful interrelated information about costs, resources, conditions, and productivity. To support decision making at different management levels with respect to the utilization of resources requires the managing, analyzing, and visualizing of these huge amount of data. This thesis presents a simple and inexpensive approach to managing, reporting, and facilitating the visualization of maintenance and repair data for school buildings. The proposed model conveniently integrates widely used spreadsheet software – MS Excel – and Geographic Information System (GIS) software – MS MapPoint. The spreadsheet’s simple and powerful capability of managing data is exploited to design a data warehouse that can facilitate reporting and visualization. The Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language was used to facilitate the integration between the two software systems and to automate the generation of a variety of reports and maps that can show analysis trends, reveal hidden relationships, and support decision making for different management levels. A real-life case study involving two years of maintenance data for 93 schools at the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is used in this thesis to illustrate the development of the model and to demonstrate its simplicity and efficiency. The use of the model as part of an integrated framework for building asset management is also highlighted.