Benchmarking Pipeline Operations and Management

Although the water and wastewater industry was somewhat late in adopting benchmarking (the first AWWARF Benchmarking Study was commissioned in 1995), there has been a great deal of activity involving benchmarking, best practices and the associated data bases since that time. Much of the early application of these techniques was in treatment plants. This was understandable since much of the competitive pressures came from contract operators in treatment plant operations. More recently, however the focus has shifted to distribution and collection systems. This paper reviews the history of benchmarking and best practices, and industry efforts to develop universal performance measures. This paper will also describe the transition from the use of cost and staffing models to the use of peer groups as a benchmarking technique. Available tools and databases will be described and an example of a distribution system benchmarking is presented.