Pittsburgh, PA… Headwaters is the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority’s new performance improvement dashboard. It highlights the progress we are making on leading organizational goals and provides greater transparency about the work we do every day.

“Throughout the organization, every department is delivering on key initiatives and day-to-day operations,” stated Robert Weimar, Executive Director of the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority. “Now, customers and the public can go to Headwaters to track our progress and see the improvements we are making to provide safe and reliable water services.”

The performance metrics we are tracking in Headwaters reflect the organizational goals identified in our Focusing on the Future Strategic Plan released in 2017. These include protecting public health and the environment, maintaining a high performing workforce, ensuring customer and stakeholder satisfaction, improving infrastructure reliability, and being an efficient and effective organization.  

The data shows how we are meeting those goals, provides a target to meet or exceed, and in some cases, an industry benchmark to meet. The metrics available in Headwaters reflect the measures that we feel are important for our ratepayers and partners to be informed of our progress.

The number of water meters repaired or replaced between January 2018 to December 2019

As an example, we are tracking the number of water meters repaired or replaced to demonstrate how we are improving infrastructure reliability. Over the past two years, we replaced or repaired 15,323 water meters and have exceeded our cumulative target of 12,000 or 500 per month. Going to Headwaters, you can easily see our progress and learn more about this goal.

The average length of time a service disruption lasts in comparison to our target and the industry benchmark.

We are also interested in how our performance compares to other utilities of similar type and size. Organizations such as the American Water Works Association (AWWA) provide benchmarks that help us better understand our performance against others in the industry. By tracking the average length of service disruption against the industry benchmark, we know that we are performing better than our internal target and similarly or better than other water utilities.