What is utility risk management?

Utility risk management consists of accepting, avoiding, and reducing unavoidable risks to and from utilities. It starts with mitigating risks to projects that entail breaking ground and ends with ensuring the safety of property, tools, and humans. Utility risk management reduces uncertainty about subsurface infrastructure, minimizes contingency costs, and enhances different kinds of protection.

What are the risk mitigating procedures?

Utility risk mitigation begins with listing every task and rating its associated risks. The next step is to assess different processes and controls and put a plan of action in place as soon as possible. Accessing accurate utility data, addressing information gaps through utility coordination, and using advanced utility mapping technologies are part of standard risk mitigating procedures.

What are 3 types of risk mitigating controls?

The three types of risk mitigating controls are: 1. Access to utility maps which give you a big picture view of various subsurface utilities. 2.Rich data regarding buried assets' age, status, ownership, and type. 3. Up-front awareness of risks associated with utilities so that you can make contingency plans to mitigate risks.

Utility Risk Mitigation

Reduce contingency and risk by utility mapping your site in advance.

Every project that breaks ground involves some degree of risk—to property and tools, to human safety, and to budgets and profits. Mitigating utility risk means protecting your team and preventing damages, but it also means minimizing contingency costs by reducing uncertainty about the subsurface.

Better utility data is key to reducing contingency and quantifying risk factors as early as possible in the project.

Most projects go through concept planning and preliminary design without locating utilities on site, instead using as-built drawings that are notoriously unreliable.

Addressing the subsurface information gap early on is crucial to using funds strategically and avoiding unexpected costs. Yet many projects cannot allocate the necessary budget for a full SUE survey early enough to impact future planning.

Designing based on unknowns can lead to greater risks of revisions, change orders, and claims, as well as lower profits due to delays and planning based on incorrect data.

Without utility risk mitigation, every stakeholder ends up “kicking the can down the road”—and the risk grows as it transfers from owners and project managers to general contractors, subcontractors, service providers, and taxpayers or customers.

Project risk can be managed using advance knowledge of utilities detected and mapped by 4M Analytics.

Big picture view.

To mitigate risk, you need a plan that can withstand the impacts of a wide range of uncertainties and unknowns. Our maps help you manage risk with greater confidence and precision: zooming out to understand the wider context, and zooming in to gather visual evidence for more accurate predictions of contingencies and impacts.

Beyond location to multiple kinds of data.

Risk comes in multiple forms, and so should your data. Our maps tell you not only where infrastructure is located under and across your site, but also give supporting information for your planning—from the age of buried assets to the type, ownership, and current status of the utilities.

Up-front awareness of risks.

4M gives you an early view into any site, from potential RFPs under consideration to current projects between or mid-phase. Every design and construction process involves some complications: make sure that you have the most high-quality data to estimate contingency and allocate time, budget, resources, and manpower for your specific area of interest.