Case introduction

Utilities today are faced with increasing pressure to improve planning and operational efficiency, often through intelligent reinvestments that support sustainability efforts.

The increased need for investment in aging infrastructure coupled with inadequate budgets and increasing regulation are forcing municipalities to modernize their operations and planning efforts using smarter, predictive, and cost-effective technologies.

Danish utility company Fors is on the forefront with a pragmatic asset management plan, leveraging data analytics to push the digital asset management agenda forward

Fors is a public utility company in Denmark servicing three major municipalities. Fors Utility is working proactively to ensure a healthy water environment and low climate footprint through technological initiatives and climate adaptation of existing systems. In total, they serve around 200,000 customers every day with one or more types of supply.

Asset Management: a central piece of Fors’ strategy to becoming a smarter utility

In 2021, Fors Utility adopted a ‘Wastewater Vision’ to ensure smart management of wastewater resources and infrastructure now and in the future. The new strategy focuses on digitization of both internal processes and customer-driven solutions – with asset management being one of the keystones in the overall digital transformation of the company. The strategy is partly about future-proofing the wastewater system of total 2900 Km (1800 mi.).

Fors Utility chose in the year 2020 to implement data|APX^® software from company APX10 in order to achieve a better overview and analysis for reinvestment planning of their utility network.

According to Fors, the most significant gain so far using the data|APX^® software has been the ability to visualize and analyze all the data that is already available. Additionally, Machine Learning is used to strengthen their data foundation, altogether providing a solid basis for defensible, data-driven decision-making.

The data|APX^® software helps us prioritize our efforts and gives us a data-driven and documented decision support tool. The risk-based approach supports us in making the efficient choices that will benefit our customers, increase the security of supply in the short and long term, and hopefully find the right balance between OPEX and CAPEX investments.

Digital Asset Management introduced across the entire organization

Fors Utility has introduced Asset Management and is currently working on further development and implementation of their new digital strategy.

In Fors Utility we have chosen a pragmatic approach for implementing Asset Management. We skipped the big road maps and holistic approach and decided to focus on designing the implementation to the maturity of our organization. This means we have selected three focus areas: short- and long-term reinvestment plans for utility network; short- and long-term reinvestment plans for production facilities; and project governance.

Fors Utility has traditionally been an operational-minded organization which induces a big challenge in relation to implement Asset Management.This new approach requires a big cultural change of mindset. All levels in the organization must change their way of thinking and approach to prioritizing investments and funds. Stakeholder involvement therefore has played a crucial role in both the design and implementation of an Asset Management strategy, as well as the development of required analysis and specification.

Fors Utility is part of the data|APX^® network in Denmark, where utilities share knowledge around digital asset management and smart use of existing data.