A decade after its inception, AMWA’s Utility Financial Information (UFI) initiative has a new name: INSIGHT. The rebranding comes with the release of the data and analyses of the 2016 UFI survey, which attracted record participation by AMWA members.
INSIGHT was designed specifically for the largest drinking water utilities across the United States to provide comparable data on a wide range of financial topics. This fifth biennial survey was conducted between September and December 2016 and officially closed with 117 utilities taking part, an increase of 15 percent over the 2014 survey.
Raftelis Financial Consultants, Inc. (RFC) assisted in executing the survey and has analyzed the raw data. Several key analyses are provided in this issue. RFC notes that trending analyses presented are not based on the same group of utilities from survey to survey, but their intent is to indicate potential trends for the industry as a whole.
These selected snapshots demonstrate the breadth and depth of possible analyses and represent a wide variety of data for comparison. It is, however, only a small fraction of the analyses possible. The full INSIGHT database was released on February 16 for use by all 2016 survey participants and is available for download from the AMWA website.
AMWA also launched a new INSIGHT dashboard to make the utility financial information more accessible to members. This innovative visualization application was created to help utility executives more quickly access and better understand the wealth of intelligence in the INSIGHT database.
And, on February 23 at 2:00 p.m. ET, AMWA will host a webinar featuring RFC representatives who will present key findings and trends from the 2016 data and will demonstrate how the dashboard can be a valuable management tool for water executives. The webinar will be recorded and made available on AMWA’s INSIGHT webpage.
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Key analyses of the 2016 UFI survey data are presented with charts, graphs and commentary (pdf).
At www.amwa.net/insight, utilities that participated in the 2016 survey can access the new INSIGHT database and dashboard.