A water utility industry conceptual asset management data warehouse model

Timely decision making is critical in today’s competitive business world and in recent times, data warehousing has been employed by numerous companies to satisfy the needs of accurate and timely information. Data warehousing has traditionally been employed for financial and customer relationship analysis with current applications now moving to other domains, such as the medical and power industries. The asset management industry is one that has seen great strides in recent years due to improved technology, but data warehousing of asset management information has been lacking. A literature review was undertaken to determine data warehousing applications in the area of asset management, and with the lessons learned, a conceptual model of data warehousing for asset management is proposed. The water utility industry is chosen to provide a grounded example of an enterprise data warehouse model that integrates data from various local information systems. The particular issues faced in the asset management domain are highlighted, and several water utility applications are presented.