Not a projection, not a model output, and not a slide. A reconciliation against a paying customer's own cost records. It ran on a private-equity-backed water operator's fleet across eleven states, with zero field hardware installed and nobody from Firstlook ever on site.
Measured across 391 continuously monitored assets over nine months. Annualized, that works out to $1,616 of realized savings per monitored asset, per year. It is the single number we carry into every other conversation.
Two things about that number matter more than its size, and both of them cut against the usual sales story.
It came from asset-level failures caught before they escalated. That is exactly the category redundancy hides in a data center or a process plant, and exactly the category nobody counts today. If you are looking for the invisible line item on your own books, this is it.
A water failure costs far less than a thermal event on a GPU cluster or a lost pharmaceutical batch. So we carry $1,616 per asset per year into other sectors unchanged, as a floor rather than a target. And we will not quote you a number until it comes out of your own history.
A separate eight-week validation on a Louisiana and Gulf-coast lift-station network, run with the same operator. Every row below is a real work order: what PRISM flagged, what the crew spent to fix it, and what the failure would have cost had it run to completion. The operator priced the avoided cost on their own books.
Parts and crew time across all nine interventions. Six of the nine cost under $1,200.
Priced by the operator against their own historical cost for the same failure run to completion.
$129,352 net across eight weeks. Higher than the fleet-wide 9.3× because this window contains only acted-on flags.
| Station | Lead time | Spent | Avoided | What the crew found |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lift station, LA transfer | 3 days | $225 | $29,740 | Major leak. Worn marine hose replaced. |
| Lift station, residential LA | 14 days | $1,474 | $28,491 | Pump 2 overload. Replaced before it seized. |
| Lift station, subdivision | 12 days | $2,981 | $26,984 | Both pumps clogging. Pulled, cleaned, reinstalled. |
| Lift station, coastal LA | 10 days | $309 | $14,656 | Three floats fallen in the wet well, wiring nicked. |
| Lift station, LA collection | 9 days | $1,145 | $13,820 | Rag build-up on Pump 1. Station failed two days after the clear. |
| Lift station, LA east | 10 days | $2,475 | $12,490 | VFD miswired at install, all wet-well floats bad. |
| Lift station, LA residential | 3 days | $28 | $3,992 | Floats greased over and off the rack. |
| Lift station, LA residential | 3 days | $56 | $3,964 | Floats coated in grease. Cleaned and repositioned. |
| Lift station, LA north | 3 days | $56 | $3,964 | Float adjustment. Corrected the following day. |
| Total, 9 interventions | $8,749 | $138,101 | 15.8× on the spend |
Read the lead times carefully. These are days, not months, and that is the point of including them. The 150-day median elsewhere on this site describes slow mechanical degradation: a bearing, a seal, an impeller wearing down over a season. The faults above are acute and hydraulic: a float falls off a rack, grease coats a switch, a hose gives way. They develop in days, so days is all the notice there is to get. Both are worth catching. A three-day warning on a $28 float that prevents a $3,992 sanitary overflow is the best return in the table.
Sixteen emergency callouts were avoided over the eight weeks. The operator's own baseline for this network was roughly 1.1 catastrophic failures per week at an average of $20,000 each, which is the figure the avoided-cost column is priced against.
A regional extract from the nine-month deployment. Every failure in the window, with the model running the whole time and nothing wired to act on it. Bar length is the number of days between the first model flag and the date the work order was written. That is the window in which the repair could have been scheduled instead of dispatched.
The scoring window reaches back 180 days from each failure. Seven events were already flagged at that outer edge, so their true lead time is longer than the chart can show. Two produced no crossing at all. They carry full cost in the failure-cost figure and earn credit nowhere in the savings. Asset names have been replaced with their class. Median advance notice across the 26 flagged events: 150+ days.
PRISM does not reduce the number of pumps needing attention. It moves the work from the emergency column to the planned column. The pump is replaced either way, so the credit is only what advance notice recovers. That turns out to be most of the bill.
| Cost line | Run to failure | Intervene on notice | Recovered |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parts, materials, contractor | Full cost | Identical | Nothing |
| Emergency mobilization premium | Incurred | Avoided | Fully recovered |
| Cascade damage: drop pipe, wire, controls | Incurred | Avoided by controlled shutdown | Fully recovered |
| Boil-water notice & clearance sampling | Incurred on service loss | Not triggered | Fully recovered |
| Emergency water distribution | Incurred on service loss | Not triggered | Fully recovered |
| Field labour | After-hours rate | Straight time, fewer hours | Most of the gap |
| Lost revenue & bill credits | Incurred | Not triggered | Fully recovered |
| Planned outage coordination | None | Small cost added | Net new cost |
The labour line, in full. Over the nine-month deployment, 711 emergency crew hours at the after-hours rate came out of the schedule, and 400 straight-time hours went back in inside the normal shift. That is 311 fewer hours worked, at a better rate, and $37,983 of avoided labour cost on that one line.
A lot of this industry blends measured results, trade estimates and marketing arithmetic into one confident paragraph. We separate them, and we badge them.
9.3× return on spend, 83.6% intervention rate, 391 assets, 26 of 28 flagged, 150+ day median notice, $1,616 per asset per year, and the nine-intervention ledger above. Reconciled against closed work orders, not modeled.
Outage cost distributions and cause rankings, insurance claim frequency and loss cost, rack density and staffing surveys, and the public record of specific incidents. Cited by source, with the survey size where one exists.
Chiller warning rates, emergency-versus-planned repair multiples, thermal ride-through, system-class weightings, and every calculator output on this site. Labeled as estimates wherever they appear.
First-order projections anchored to the record above. The real number comes out of your telemetry during an evaluation.
Scaled from realized per-asset savings, with the intervention rate as the control that moves the answer.
Basis. $1,616 realized savings per monitored asset per year at an 83.6% intervention rate, scaled linearly. Event frequency from 28 failures across 391 assets in a 228-day window, annualized. System-class weighting is modeled. Excludes asset-life extension, capital deferral, energy and regulatory upside.
Downtime priced entirely on your own hourly number. Maintenance avoidance priced on ours.
Basis. Downtime exposure is entirely your input. Presets anchored to published survey bands: 91% of mid-size and large enterprises put an hour above $300K, 41% between $1M and $5M or more. Maintenance avoidance at $1,616 per monitored asset per year, carried unchanged from the water deployment as a conservative floor. Excludes secondary damage, expedited freight, capacity loss from equipment lead times, and insurance effects.
We build a model on your telemetry and run it backwards against failures you already lived through. Misses counted as loudly as hits.
Firstlook production data. Reconciled deployment results, event register, lead times, intervention rate and accuracy: Firstlook production water deployment, 391 assets, nine months; a 28-event regional extract over a 228-day observation window, scored against the customer's closed work orders; and a separate eight-week lift-station validation, August to September 2025, comprising nine closed interventions priced by the operator. The two engagements are reported separately and their figures are not combined.
Cost model. Built from a loaded straight-time field-labour rate with an after-hours multiplier, plus documented mobilization, cascade, notification, sampling and lost-revenue lines. A probability-weighted reputational allocation is included in the fully loaded basis and can be removed on request for a hard-cost view. Avoided-cost figures in the intervention ledger are the operator's own pricing against their historical cost for the same failure run to completion.
Third-party research. Outage cost distribution and cause ranking: Uptime Institute Annual Outage Analysis 2026 (n=94 operators) and Global Survey 2025 / Resiliency Survey 2026. Hourly cost bands: ITIC 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Survey. Claim frequency and loss cost: Allianz Commercial data center claims review; Swiss Re and FM Global on direct liquid cooling loss share. Rack density and staffing: AFCOM State of the Data Center 2026 and published vendor rack roadmaps.
Standards. NFPA 70B (2023 and 2026 editions, the latter cited from NFPA's published committee record rather than the issued text); SAE JA1011 and IEC 60300-3-11 for P-F interval criteria; IEEE C57.91, IEEE C57.104 and IEC 60599 for transformers; IEEE 519 for harmonics; ANSI/NETA MTS for thermographic severity. Telemetry standards: DMTF Redfish DSP2064, ASHRAE Guideline 36, BRICK schema.
Estimates. Chiller and transformer warning rates, emergency-versus-planned repair multiples and failure development windows are trade-source estimates rather than measurements, as are all calculator outputs. Excluded from every figure on this site: the widely quoted per-minute downtime cost that traces to a vendor-sponsored study of 63 sites and has not been refreshed in a decade; asset-life extension and capital-deferral upside; and energy and carbon savings from efficiency correction.
Full reference list and the underlying cost model available on request under NDA. If a figure on this site matters to your decision, ask us for the working. We would rather send it than have you accept it without evidence.