The farm-to-table movement strives to honor the integrity and traceability of ingredients. This process encompasses selecting local and seasonable products, tweaking recipes to optimize these ingredients, and serving a delicious meal that customers feel is tailored to their home. End-to-end asset management follows a similar multi-faceted and interconnected trajectory, which is not one-size-fits-all, but rather a personalized process suited to each customer and their region. Nina’s presentation, Farm-to-Table Asset Management: From FieldHarvesting to ModelRecipes to Plating Your Final Plan, shares how these parallels can help clients create an asset management plan that suits their unique circumstances.
Field collection mirrors the farm: ideally sustainable and predictable, but often full of unexpected surprises or even weather impacts. After the data harvest comes the kitchen, characterizing the system with a hydraulic model, statistical model, or other analysis, and optimizing the ingredients for a truly representative recipe. With the final asset management plan dish, the customer enjoys an interactive dining experience with commentary back to the kitchen, and the whole process starts again.
No asset management plan will be perfect, especially with time, budget, and resource constraints. However, restriction breeds creativity, and some of the best meals you’ll ever have come from using what’s available and adapting to what you want, but don’t have. Modern chefs continuously balance honoring the classics while nixing decades-old holdover techniques techniques that were originally defined by food and equipment now out-of-date. With modern asset management, new financial and technological realities expose which engineering practices truly are fundamentals, and which ones belong back in the attic with your grandma’s gelatin salad recipe.
Nina Caraway, PE is a Senior Technical Specialist on our Utilities team. She has diverse experience in water resources engineering, with a focus on data analysis and systems modeling. Her experience spans large-scale climate modeling, basin water management, and statewide planning to the small but critical details of distribution and collection systems. She helps clients leverage their data to produce predictive and reproducible system analysis with an overall goal of realistic asset management solutions.
This preview is part of our AWWA Speaker Preview series, which highlights the WithersRavenel staff invited to speak at the 2021 NC AWWA-WEA Spring Symposium.