Water Utility Asset Management Software

1. Widespread Infrastructure: The majority of small to medium sized utilities actually have to maintain more feet of main lines in order to serve fewer customer which leads to greater opportunities for main breaks. With a lack of resources, they also don't have immediate access to sophisticated leak detection software or services.
2. Shrinking Revenue Base: Rural towns have seen an increase in urban flight, the disappearance of high-paying middle class blue collar work, which has lead to smaller populations, lower birth rates, lower median incomes. This makes it difficult for utilities to impose the rate increases necessary to provide water service at a high-level without taking on too much municipal dept.
3. High Employee Turnover: The average age of workers in the utility industry has been increasing with a high number of utility workers set to retire in the next 10 or 15 years. This coupled with the lack of talent entering into the industry, we have a labor shortage that's making it difficult for water utility operators to find hard working, quality talent to backfill the employees who've been at the utility for a long time.
4. Paper Maps and Outdated Records: Most small utilities have only one computer, which is either being used by the office manager to maintain the billing software, or it's too old to be even used and sits back in the corner. The majority of the institutional knowledge in the water utility either lives in an operators head or it's on a punch card locked away in a filing cabinet.

These aren't abstract industry trends. They're what keeps operators up at night.

• Hydrants
• Valves
• Manholes
• Culverts
• Force Main Lines
• Main Lines
• Service Lines
• Gate Valve
• Ball Valve
• Butterfly Valve
• Curb Stops
• Booster Stations
• CSO's
• Gravity Lines
• Fittings
• Catch Basins
• Cleanouts
• Inlets
• Lateral Lines
• Lift Stations
  
• Meters
• Booster Stations
• Ponds
• Pump Stations
• Service Taps
• Tanks
• Wells

And that’s just the underground stuff.

You’re also managing people, trucks, buildings, motors, pumps, facilities, and equipment — plus backflow prevention monitoring, smoke surveys, inspections, lead and copper testing, and more.

Information about these assets matters to office managers, engineers, vendors, contractors, excavators, and pipe distributors. Everyone needs access to the same data.

How are you managing all of this today? If the answer involves multiple software tools with different licenses, different versions, and different user interfaces, you’re making your job harder. Ziptility puts it all in one app — GIS, work orders, inspections, locates, and asset management — so your team can focus on the work, not the tools.

With modern water utility asset management software, you should be able to see a full history of everything that’s ever been done to a particular asset. For a hydrant, that means flow tests, repairs like replacing a chain or gasket, and fire inspection results. Keeping hydrants fully functional is critical for fire response. And it’s just as important for everyone else at the utility to have visibility into that history. Full transparency into every decision and every job completed on an asset is what makes water utility management actually work.

That kind of record also matters when someone new joins the crew. Instead of relying on tribal knowledge or asking around, a new operator can tap any asset and see its full history — what was done, when, and by whom. The learning curve gets shorter because the system itself holds the knowledge.

Your asset management software should make it easy for crew members to create work orders for themselves, assign tasks to a teammate who’s better suited for a particular repair, or log work that’s already been completed so the whole team stays on the same page.

1. See Locates On Your Mobile Device: You shouldn't have to go into the office and print off 100 811 locate tickets. Your crew should be able to see the 811 locate tickets and all of the information associated with them as they come in. What priority is the ticket? Emergency or Normal? Who called it in? What depth are they digging? What's the service for? When does it need to be done by? It should also give the information of the coordinates, it references, but also a general location description. This will allow your crew to save precious time and increase your field crew productivity.
2. Complete Them & Save History Of Locates: Your 811 locate software and app should allow you to complete the locate, add some notes about the job you did, but then also allow you to take pictures of the job that you did. You are only required in most states to keep a record of the locate ticket for 21 days, but it's a good practice to have these in storage forever because, you want to have record that you did the locate if someone were ever to hit your utilities.
3. Search By Priority or Date: Your 811 Locate Ticket Software should allow you to search for your locates based on when they're due or by their priority. Knowing that a locate is a priority locate versus a normal one is critical in planning out your day.
4. Bi-Directional Updating with GIS Software: When you're doing a locate, you're identifying where a utility is and you have the ability to update critical infrastructure information regarding that asset for everyone else in your water utility to benefit from. When you make a change, while doing a locate, that data should be updated in your GIS Maps as well.

1. Water Valve Exercising: Utility Crew members should be able to view any asset data or work history relating to that asset on any iOS, Android device or computer.
2. Manhole Inspections: With a robust solution like Ziptility, utility crews will be able to track critical data about their manholes, like depth, invert and elevation data, photos of the manhole walls, and even capture this information underground without cell signal.
3. Backflow Prevention Reminders: With automated alerts and reminders, utility operators and utility managers, can be notified when an upcoming backflow prevention tests needs to be sent. The results from the backflow test can also be captured, stored, and visualized on your map.
4. Hydrant Flushing & Inspection: With the ability to capture flow test information and unstructured inspection data, your utility asset management software should allow you to log work, as soon as it's done, so that it's shared with your team in real-time.
5. Lead & Service Line Replacement Programs: With the new lead and copper rule revisions and provisions, utility operators will be responsible for identifying and replacing service lines that pass a certain threshold of parts per million of lead and copper. By running a simple query, users should be able to visualize all of the lead lines in the system, and schedule work with outside vendors for them to be replaced, as well as a task to inform the residents of the replacement.
6. Main Line Extensions: Main line extensions or replacements are a regular part of effective water utility management. Ziptility makes it easy to add or extend mainlines based on new GPS coordinates captured. Record the depth of the new main line, the material, the corresponding shutoff valves, and if there are any clamps or fittings on the existing lines, so others in your crew can check for water leaks.