Performance Assessment System to Wastewater Utilities Strategic Planning

Abstract

Urban water utilities face growing challenges in compliance with increasingly demanding legislation, tightening budgets, ageing personnel, decreasing infrastructure reliability, increasing operational costs, regulatory pressure, and climate change. Within this context, tracking the alignment of the performance with the mission and strategic objectives of the organization, based on reliable and up-to-date data, is of utmost importance to enable effective and continual improvement management. Organizational performance assessment in the water sector has been a topic of growing attention since the 1990s due to the increase in the role of regulators and tighter legislation. Proactive utilities are incorporating sustainability, resource efficiency, resilience, and continual improvement principles in their practices. Strategic planning provides the road map for management and interconnecting the different areas of the organization. An essential component of strategic management planning is the adoption of a tailored performance assessment system (PAS), allowing a better response to these challenges from the water utility management perspective. This paper presents a novel PAS at the strategic level, which was tested and validated with wastewater utilities, in a co-creation process. The proposed PAS fully adopts the objectives recommended in international standards, with a corresponding set of criteria and metrics, and a validated proposal of reference values for the metrics.

A comprehensive performance assessment system for diagnosis and decision-support to improve water and energy efficiency and its demonstration in Portuguese collective irrigation systems

“…In line with the need to provide adequate service levels, a structured PAS for strategic infrastructure assessment management was developed by Alegre and Coelho (2012) and Alegre et al (2013). In addition, different PAS were developed for the diagnosis of water losses and energy inefficiencies in drinking water systems (Mamade et al, 2017), undue inflows and systems' functioning aspects in wastewater and stormwater systems (Almeida et al, 2017;Santos, 2021) and energy inefficiencies in urban water systems (Loureiro et al, 2020).…”

Water, Energy, and Emissions Nexus: Effect of Inflows in Urban Drainage Systems

“…Previous studies on strategic and tactical assessments of wastewater utilities provide the background for proceeding with this analysis, looking at the water, energy, and emissions nexus [27][28][29]. Results showed that service provision objectives are compromised by overflow discharges and surface flooding, even if not regularly quantified.…”

“…As proposed in[28]; 2 as proposed in[27]; 3 adapted from[28] (the reference values were adapted to the current study, in P11-P13, considering an impact factor associated with the electric consumption of 0.47 kgCO2 eq/kWh according to[30], for the Portuguese scope).…”