Following a successful pilot with MentorAPM, Genesee County Drain Commissioner Division of Water & Waste Services (GCDC-WWS) has expanded its partnership with the solutions provider.
GCDC-WWS operates and maintains one of Michigan’s largest water utilities, serving about 155,000 residents — roughly one-third of Genesee County — across 21 communities.
Genessee County will contracting for subscriptions to three MentorAPM solutions: MentorLens, Risk & Criticality Analyzer and Asset Investment Planner.
MentorLens is an asset inventory and condition assessment solution that enables field crews to collect and log asset data up to 10 times faster than traditional methods, with greater accuracy and at 75 percent lower cost through simply taking photos.
“After nearly 40 years in water utility leadership, I believe resilience comes from innovation and data-driven decisions,” said Assistant Director of Water at GCDC-WWS Terry Biederman, PE. “MentorLens solved two critical problems immediately — collecting asset information with limited resources and eliminating manual data entry errors. Our mission is to operate state-of-the-art facilities that protect public health, and MentorAPM gives us the data foundation to do exactly that.”
In the past, condition assessments for GCDC-WWS were costly, time-intensive, point-in-time efforts that were often outdated shortly after completion.
MentorLens transforms this process by enabling crews to rapidly capture structured asset data in the field by simply taking photos with a phone or tablet. Asset photos are assessed using MentorLens AI to generate condition scores and extract critical asset attributes, before integrating seamlessly with GCDC-WWS’s existing Cityworks work order system, creating a continuous feedback loop between field conditions and operational planning.
By combining continuously updated condition data with operational history, GCDC-WWS can leverage MentorAPM’s Risk and Criticality Analyzer to develop dynamic risk models that identify and rank the most critical assets with far greater speed and precision. This end-to-end flow – from capture to condition to risk – feeds directly into MentorAPM’s Asset Investment Planner for the development of accurate, risk-based capital improvement plans grounded in defensible, up-to-date insights.
This integrated approach, which Biederman describes as unmatched by other asset management providers, positions GCDC-WWS to allocate resources more confidently and plan infrastructure investments with a clarity that static, periodic condition assessments simply cannot provide.
“GCDC-WWS views GIS as the geo-spatial center of the universe and builds integrated applications around it that let us leverage that investment as a real day-to-day tool,” said Biederman. “The criticality and capital planning side of MentorAPM is going to help us take condition assessment data, combine it with what we’re seeing from SCADA and other existing platforms, and get better probability-of-failure and consequence-of-failure calculations. This will provide the foundation for more accurate capital improvement plan development and implementation. I haven’t found another application suite out there that holds this kind of promise.”
The three MentorAPM point solutions deployed at GCDC-WWS are part of the MentorAPM asset management suite — a complete asset lifecycle and work management platform for water and wastewater utilities. Together, the software helps water and wastewater utilities move from reactive to proactive work management, providing the big picture in an easy-to-understand format for optimized resources and sustainable operations.
Source: MentorAPM
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