Resilience is easy to talk about and hard to deliver. For water and wastewater utilities, it means sustaining safe, reliable service despite aging assets, workforce transitions, regulatory pressure, and increasing operational risk. That is exactly what the Water Industry Reliability Forum set out to unpack in a practical way during the Reliability Conference, in a full-day workshop co-hosted in collaboration with MaxGrip and Reliabilityweb. This is a recap of those sessions and discussions with the audience.
Start with the Foundation: Consistent and Complete Asset Data
The forum opened with a simple reality: if your asset data foundation is inconsistent, every decision becomes harder to defend. In “Transforming Asset Data Management Through a Standardized Asset Hierarchy at IRWD,” Verowin Hunting (Irvine Ranch Water District) and Logan Cowley (MaxGrip) showed how standardizing hierarchy and naming conventions improves EAM effectiveness and maintenance performance.
The IRWD story resonated with the conference audience because it was familiar. Their initial hierarchy lacked consistency and standardization, which contributed to underutilization of Maximo and created very practical consequences: duplicate assets and locations, incorrect work order assignment, lower maintenance efficiency, and reduced transparency and trust. The path forward by IRWD was not presented as a one-time cleanup. It was framed as governance: developing asset policy aligned with ISO and AWWA best practices, piloting at a site to refine the approach, and then deploying across vertical sites using a phased model to establish, deploy, validate, and sustain.
In “You Can’t Fix Everything: Using Asset Criticality to Tackle Aging Water Infrastructure,” Ghitte Neethling and Andrew Dixon (MaxGrip) made the point utilities live every day: assets are aging, but budgets, labor, and tolerance for outages are limited. The real challenge is not knowing assets are old. It is choosing where to act first.
They pushed back on “age-based” decision making. Not every old asset is high risk, so prioritization has to combine consequence of failure, likelihood of failure, condition, and operating context. The session also called out the “illusion of equality,” where critical and non-critical assets get the same maintenance attention, wasting labor and spares.
A key discussion with the audience centered on the fact that this should be an evergreen process. Criticality should evolve as you learn. Start with the data you already have, review it regularly, and adjust while you get to know more about the behavior of the assets.
The Loss of Tribal Knowledge
In the session about “Workforce Transition and Knowledge Retention,” Ghitte Neethling and Andrew Dixon described why the problem is structural: fewer experienced workers per asset, growing technical complexity, rising dependency on key individuals, greater exposure to execution and safety risk, and less capacity for continuous improvement because scarce resources get consumed by day-to-day operations.
The workshop made “tribal knowledge” tangible. It is not only procedures. It is localized operational intuition like how a specific pump behaves in winter, which clarifier has recurring vibration issues, and when a noise “is not normal.”
The attendee discussion was candid: capturing tribal knowledge is enormous, and starting a year before retirement is often too late, especially when experienced staff still need to be in the field to keep operations stable. This is where the session’s framing landed: utilities face two paths. One is reacting to retirements and accepting higher operational risk. The other is redesigning maintenance, institutionalizing knowledge, stabilizing systems, and building resilience deliberately. “Resilience is not automatic. It is engineered.”
Modernization Under Scrutiny: How to Build the Case
In “Modernization and Investment: Making the Right Case,” Andrew Dixon and Lisa Kamphuis framed modernization as a control decision, not a technology decision. The most fundable cases start by defining where you are today, where you need to be in 3 to 5 years, and the outcomes you will deliver, tied to process discipline, risk-based prioritization, and long-term resilience.
To make it finance-ready, the session recommended a four-step structure: establish a baseline, quantify financial leakage, identify improvement levers, and translate them into financial impact (payback, time to value, ROI). Baselines to include: downtime cost, annual maintenance cost, reactive vs planned ratio, repeat failure cost, and inventory value. Then show how modernization enables levers like better planning and scheduling, fewer repeat failures, optimized spares, and better cost and performance visibility, with governance and data ownership called out explicitly to reduce investment risk.
Closing Panel: Turning Themes into Next Steps
The forum closed with a panel moderated by Bob Francis (Reliabilityweb), with Verowin Hunting (IRWD), Andy Yang (San Jose Water), and Logan Cowley (MaxGrip). The throughline across the day was consistent: resilience is built through disciplined foundations and repeatable decision practices, not one-off initiatives.
What Utilities Can Take Away
By the close of the forum, resilience came through as something utilities build on purpose, not something they simply “have.” Across every session, the same thread kept resurfacing: real performance happens when the full “empowered to perform” system is aligned, meaning dependable data, fit-for-purpose systems and tools, clear processes, and people set up to succeed through consistent ways of working with defined roles and responsibilities.
From that foundation, the path forward becomes clearer. Instead of trying to treat every aging asset as equally urgent, utilities can use criticality as a living decision framework that sharpens over time as teams learn more about consequence, condition, and failure behavior. And when modernization is on the table, the strongest cases are the ones that connect operational goals to measurable control: establish a baseline, quantify leakage, tie improvement levers to financial impact, and reduce investment risk with governance and clear data ownership.
