Can I Afford to Use That

Can I Afford to Use That?

Evaluating New Technology and Its Value for Sewer and Stormwater Infrastructure

Maintaining sewer and stormwater infrastructure for a community requires difficult decisions every day. The goals set for a given year can change: whether to increase capacity, whether to improve efficiency, whether to prevent future breakdowns. It leaves many asking the question, “Can I afford to use that?”.

The choices from there can get even more daunting, as there are hundreds of different solutions available, and the effectiveness of any one can be dependent on your local environment, skill of the installer as well as quality of the product being used. Add to this an ever shrinking public budget and the unknown of what may fail in a given year, and you have the definition of managing a public utility.

So, how do you evaluate new technology while considering labor costs, durability, performance of the product and incidental costs?

Do the Math- You will have to use something to turn all the information you have gathered into a decision. There are a variety of tools developed to help with this, and depending on how much data and information you have, you may want to develop something unique for your situation. In general, however, the goal is to standardize the cost of product, cost of labor, cost of future repairs or replacements, and any savings that you expect to achieve, and weigh all this against your budget.

Conclusion- When evaluating any new technology, you will have a lot of information to review. The analysis requires you to look at not only the cost of materials, but at the entire cost of operation for a given year. As you compile more information into you evaluation, you will often find a high initial product cost does not mean a high total job cost, but rather a lower total job cost. Technologies are developed on the basis of bringing value to potential customers, and companies will typically be able to tell you where that value can be found. It is up to each municipality to look at the value equations based on their own costs, and based on their own objectives, to see if that technology brings the right value for its needs. Often, once you have all the relevant information in front of you, you will begin to ask a new question, “Can I afford NOT to use that?”.