InfoAsset Manager: Our time-tested tool for water utilities now available with Autodesk subscription

Without a purpose-built tool, asset management work can be tedious, exhausting, and frustrating, especially when trying to tie your data to existing hydraulic models. For this reason, Autodesk is happy to re-introduce InfoAsset Manager, now made more robust with included mobile and online capabilities.

InfoAsset Manager is comprehensive asset management software that integrates, manages, and optimizes water and wastewater network assets. With InfoAsset Manager, utilities can consolidate data from diverse sources and provide robust visualization, reporting, and risk-based prioritization capabilities so they can make informed operational decisions, plan proactive maintenance, and respond efficiently to emergencies.

3 reasons our customers choose it

There are a lot of asset management software options out there to choose from. We think InfoAsset Manager has always stood out to water professionals for three important reasons:

1. Built for water: InfoAsset Manager is built for water and sewer networks from the ground up. Can it also include user defined assets like roads, trees, and treatment plant vertical assets? Of course it can, but what really makes InfoAsset Manager so popular with our customers is that it is built specifically for the management and operation of water distribution, sewer collection, stormwater, drainage, and river networks.
2. Strong integrations: Because InfoAsset Manager shares the same type of database as InfoWorks ICM, you have many options for integrating hydraulic model data into your asset management practice. It also works nicely with InfoWorks WS Pro and our live solutions like IWLive Pro and ICMLive. With just a few clicks, detailed, hydraulically sound networks can be created using data from your asset management networks.
3. Flexible and modular: The custodians of assets typically strive to create recurring project types and workflows, but – more often than not – they realize they need to find solutions for issues that they’ve never faced before. InfoAsset Manager offers a lot of ways for you to solve these kinds of problems. For example, it can be enhanced with InfoAsset Mobile and InfoAsset Online or extended via integrations using InfoAsset Exchange. It’s a powerful toolbox that offers you many different configurations for a variety of purposes.

The problem-solving aspect of InfoAsset Manager is based on a lot of real-world needs from our customers that have been developed over many years. Need to join GIS and time series data to report on water quality? No problem. Want to display your CCTV data in a browser during a city council meeting? Check. Looking to map GPS surveys and quickly turn them into manhole assets? Easily done. This software has been built over time to meet the needs of not just asset managers, but the people they collaborate with.

Architected for collaboration

Hydraulic models require up-to-date and reliable data in order to get accurate results. These models are inherently data hungry. Therefore, the ability to understand the provenance of the data and perform audits on the data to establish confidence in the data is essential. For them to work effectively, data must be collected AND verified. This can be very difficult and time consuming without robust data editing, validation and data infilling capabilities. InfoAsset Manager, in combination with InfoAsset Mobile, can provide accurate, up-to-date and auditable data to justify the use of the data for hydraulic modeling purposes. Users provide the data to sustain the updating of hydraulic models on a regular basis and therefore synchronized to the asset register.

InfoAsset Manager essentially combines three systems into a single, integrated platform. It combines the benefits of an enterprise level RDBMS database (think Oracle/SQL Server), a geospatial database (GIS), and an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool (Python, R, even Azure Data Factory). InfoAsset Manager comes out-of-the-box with accessibility for all this functionality while also allowing for multi-user editing on a locally hosted server, robust data flagging, and standardized asset management reporting.

Getting started is an easy lift

The software is designed to be easy to approach for new users, with lots of ways to scale up your usage to take advantage of extra features as you grow:

• Multi-user support: Multiple users can edit the database concurrently. You can track changes, view your network history, follow a clear audit trail, and rely on validation tools to ensure your teams are always on the same page.
• Template-friendly: InfoAsset Manager’s schema is set, but it is also configurable. This allows for easy template building and sharing of selections, reports, and themes.
• Extendable: As mentioned, you don’t need to rely on scripts, but you do have options for utilizing scripts to expand your capabilities if you want. Our GitHub site provides a library of reusable SQL and Ruby scripts, which have been shared across InfoAsset Manager databases around the world.

Now part of a complete package

InfoAsset Manager is also a good value. Historically, InfoAsset Mobile and InfoAsset Online were additional tools that required separate purchases, but now that InfoAsset Manager is available as an Autodesk subscription, these two options are included as part of the whole package. This means that others in your organization who need access to InfoAsset Mobile or InfoAsset Online can take advantage of its expanded capabilities (up to 200 logins included).

What can you do with these companion apps ?

• InfoAsset Mobile: Work orders are an essential aspect of field work, which is where Mobile comes into play. Your teams can work in an Internet connected or unconnected state, viewing work orders against assets using a digital map and reporting it back to the office immediately, or after returning from the field if your teams don’t have Internet access in the field.
• InfoAsset Online: Designed for end users who need access to the data stored in the workgroup database. It offers read-only visualizations and reporting, with the optional ability to be integrated with ArcGIS Online.

Comparing asset management solutions

Just as there is more than one “asset management” definition, so there are (and have been) multiple Autodesk water asset management solutions over the years. Currently, we offer two. Let’s see how InfoAsset Manager stacks up to Info360 Asset in this handy chart we created. 👇

What about Info360 Asset?

Our other asset management app is Info360 Asset, the next-generation SaaS-based asset management solution that has been rapidly developing based on our public product roadmap. In essence, Info360 Asset is designed for planning and developing future infrastructure needs, while InfoAsset Manager is geared towards the ongoing management, maintenance, and optimization of existing assets:

• Info360 Asset may be better suited for customers focused on long-term asset planning and capital investments. This SaaS tool helps identify long-term infrastructure development needs, assists in assessing current and future demand for water and wastewater services, and is very useful for planning new assets and the expansion or upgrading of existing assets. If you’re growth-oriented, it might be the better choice.
• InfoAsset Manager may be better for customers who are primarily focused on day-to-day data management and maintenance of existing infrastructure. This installed software was designed to connect field and office workflows to ensure the reliability, efficiency, and sustainability of water and wastewater services while optimizing the lifespan of assets. If your domain is in maintenance and keeping asset records up-to-date and situationally aware, it might be the better choice.

By reviewing the product roadmap, it’s clear to see that Info360 Asset is adding feature after feature as it develops into a robust, cloud-based tool, while InfoAsset Manager will only see modest updates as installed software. This detail alone may guide your decision. Of course, we encourage you to contact someone on our team to help you decide which option fits you best.

A solid tool for beginning your asset management journey

While no asset management journey is the same, most water utilities have a basic set of needs to fulfill. InfoAsset Manager provides the tools and workflows needed to continuously monitor and assess the health history of water, wastewater, stormwater, drainage, and river assets. InfoAsset Manager – with its now included companion apps – offers a full suite of tools to help you with network data management and validation, condition monitoring and assessment, work crew and resources management, rehabilitation planning, incident management, performance management, and failure management.

But water utilities can go further. The software provides ways to plan for the future using risk modeling, deterioration analysis, depreciation analysis, leakage management, and CSO/SSO reporting and monitoring, which you can access via both standard and user-defined reports. Perhaps most important is the ability to go even deeper and integrate your utility’s actual hydraulic models while cleansing and validating your GIS data. This creates an accurate, single source of truth – so you’ll always know what is happening and be able to model and implement a better future.

InfoAsset Manager’s treatment of data as a single source of truth is a key feature. Perhaps more than any other water discipline, asset managers require the widest range of data types to operate effectively. And yet… they are almost never the custodians of these varied datasets that often include data about telemetry, work order records, financial data, hydraulic model results, CCTV/condition assessment, as-built constructed drawings, customer complaints, laboratory data, and of course GIS data. InfoAsset Manager can help asset managers collate all of these data types into one organized space that automatically update from their source on a scheduled basis.

Add it all up, and InfoAsset Manager is a compelling and time-tested suite of applications. It offers a solid out-of-the-box experience, with plenty of options for customization and extensibility.

Ready to learn more?

• Get acquainted with the high-level details on the InfoAsset Manager product page.
• Go deeper with an extensive introduction and demo of InfoAsset Manager.
• You’ll find free training videos that detail nearly every feature of InfoAsset Manager on these YouTube playlists.
• We have an InfoAsset Manager Technical Information Hub to help customers quickly find answers to technical questions.

Have a specific question? Reach out to an Autodesk sales representative, who can answer any questions you have to ensure you’re getting the best product for your specific needs.