Abstract
Urban water utilities face growing challenges in compliance with increasingly demanding legislation, tightening budgets, ageing personnel, decreasing infrastructure reliability, increasing operational costs, regulatory pressure, and climate change. Within this context, tracking the alignment of the performance with the mission and strategic objectives of the organization, based on reliable and up-to-date data, is of utmost importance to enable effective and continual improvement management. Organizational performance assessment in the water sector has been a topic of growing attention since the 1990s due to the increase in the role of regulators and tighter legislation. Proactive utilities are incorporating sustainability, resource efficiency, resilience, and continual improvement principles in their practices. Strategic planning provides the road map for management and interconnecting the different areas of the organization. An essential component of strategic management planning is the adoption of a tailored performance assessment system (PAS), allowing a better response to these challenges from the water utility management perspective. This paper presents a novel PAS at the strategic level, which was tested and validated with wastewater utilities, in a co-creation process. The proposed PAS fully adopts the objectives recommended in international standards, with a corresponding set of criteria and metrics, and a validated proposal of reference values for the metrics.
Highlights
If the utility region all participating utilities conditions to respond updespite to metrics using available all participating utilities had conditions to respond up to metrics using available does not have surface waters with recreational or similar uses, M1.1.2 and
A tailored performance assessment system (PAS) is an essential component of strategic management planning for water utilities, for tracking performance in alignment with its mission and strategic objectives based on reliable and up-to-date data, and to enable effective and continual improvement management
Few studies have been undertaken on wastewater and stormwater systems
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. PAS have been applied in water supply and wastewater systems, covering several service objectives and criteria [18,19], frequently with a regulator perspective or directed to a specific concern They are often limited in addressing the strategic objectives recommended in international standards (e.g., EN 752:2017, ISO 24,500 series) [20,21,22,23] and in incorporating key areas from tactical plans. A structure centered on the definition of objectives, assessment criteria, rics (O-C-M), complemented with reference values, allows a robust comparison between and metrics (O-C-M), complemented with reference values, allows a robust comparison utilities and systems Such a PAS facilitates the implementation of continual improvement between andsystems systems.standards.
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