Welsh Water has reduced its unplanned maintenance jobs by more than a quarter in the past two years to leave teams freer to focus on extending asset life instead of fixing faults. The company began a complete overhaul of how it maintains its geographically dispersed asset base by introducing service logistics to save time and money.
Nick Garnett, Welsh Water’s head of maintenance, and Julian Mosquera of technology consultancy Bearing Point, which worked with the water company to overhaul maintenance, told Utility Week about the journey from reactive to proactive.
The service and cost challenges of PR19 have forced companies to radically rethink their processes to find efficiencies to pass on to customers without scrimping on performance.
Within the operational expenditure, engineering maintenance is a significant cost for any business with an intensive network of assets that need supporting.
“There’s been a lot of work done in the past couple decades targeting better planning and productivity improvements but AMP7 has really sharpened the pencil and put a focus on best practice and operational excellence – with really high performing resilience around assets,” Mosquera said.
Garnett added: “Like many other companies we’ve evaluated our approach and improved over the past eight years but reached a plateau. So, I looked away from the water industry to other sectors’ maintenance space to find improvements.”
Service logistics
Service logistics is the planning and execution of the physical maintenance activity, including the availability of spare parts as and when required. But, as Mosquera explains, it is more than spare parts management. The sweet spot is getting the right people and parts to the point of consumption.
Bringing experience from high-tech industries, Mosquera studied the utility sector’s widely geographically distributed asset base that requires engineers spending time travelling around.
The first challenge was compiling master data on the asset base, which meant visiting pumping stations and treatment plants for both supply and wastewater to assess and upload information to the cloud. Mosquera said this would not have been possible without smart phones and tablet technology, which enabled real time updates from the field.
“Whether it’s an attendance that requires parts or not, the engineer needs to know what they are going to. The master data is essential for the business.”
He explained that in 10-15 per cent of incidents engineers would not know before visiting an asset what would be required and therefore may not have the relevant parts.
“Melding information, logistics, human input and spare parts is what really matters. When you have confidence in that master data, you can plan and schedule instead of reacting to requirements,” Mosquera said.
Garnett explained the value from that data, which is now continually updated: “You can make really good decisions about maintenance tasks and service logistics based on the quality of the master data.
“People are strategising two or three AMPs away on what to do with maintenance repair and asset replacement so that up-to-date information can be fed into deterioration models to make better decisions.”
Service kits
After data, the second limiting factor related to how and when companies tended to order and stock spare parts. This involved a shift from ordering spare parts as required and responding reactively to repairs, which Garnett and Mosquera said will improve the resilience of networks.
To do that Welsh Water equipped its engineers with service kits to carry out a variety of repairs, from non-major to invasive, in order to break the cycle of being highly reactive and move towards planned maintenance. “We are driving the resilience and robustness of the network that the regulator wants so we need to do it in a planned and predictable way,” Mosquera explained. This meant thinking about the types of failure mode that were routinely attended to and ensuring the relevant parts would be in the van in a set kit. For more complex intrusive or invasive repairs engineering teams had separate service kits.
Maintenance, in general, is about keeping assets in a healthy condition, not just doing repairs when something has gone wrong, therefore Mosquera said the service logistics approach reduces the number of breaks and extend the life / health of the asset.
“Over time the company can see what parts are most useful to spend on and what is a useful, or not, activity,” Mosquera said. “With a smarter focus on the activities that are most useful, teams can plan those that have the best impact using analytics to inform what is useful.”
To compile the master data Welsh Water first focused on its c.3,000 sewage pumping stations before moving onto wastewater treatment works information, which would each contain multiple assets that require data input. Garnett said the company is well on its way to having a complete database of its assets.
“The penny hadn’t really dropped before about how critical the data is to decision making,” he added but said the results, although in early stages still, have spoken for themselves.
In the first year that Welsh Water worked with Bearing Point it saw an 18 per cent reduction in unplanned maintenance orders and the following year a further 27 per cent reduction. Garnett said his teams are still busy but now they are now focussed on planned and preventative maintenance work, showing a fall in reactive failures.