UUW owns and operates the wastewater network in North West England. The company treats 1271 million litres of wastewater every day via a network of 43,419 kilometres of sewers. They serve a population approaching seven million people and 2.9 million households and business premises. They are also a provider of water and wastewater services to over 400 industrial and commercial enterprises.
The Challenge
In 2003 the Water and Electricity businesses within United Utilities replaced their multiple legacy asset management systems with a Master Asset Management System (MAMS) underpinned by AMT-SYBEX’s Enterprise Asset Management system, Ellipse.
The Electricity business developed the system for their use. For the Water business, whilst it removed the overhead of maintaining disparate systems and brought asset information under one repository unfortunately the system was never maximised. This was mainly due to the available technology at the time restricting access from the field and as a consequence information flow was reliant on a ‘paper system’.
In 2007 driven by the need to plan for the PR09 price review and the need to increase the overall maintenance of its assets, the Water business took a decision to extend the use of MAMS.
The review team was led by Glyn Hughes, Project manager for the Effective Operations and Maintenance workstream within the company’s World Class Asset Management programme, who reasoned that as Ellipse was being used successfully in some areas of the business and indeed was established across the globe in hundreds of organisations the product must be adaptable to meet their needs.
The review established:- - The system was centrally based with too great a reliance on paper.
- That better training, targeted at the right employees, was needed.
- Asset lists were incomplete and there could be little confidence in the data.
- As people needed information and had access to Excel and Access tools, many had developed their own reports. Because this information was being extracted from a variety of un-reconciled data sources it was giving rise to inaccurate management information.
The Solution
Glyn established a Project Team under the steer of Garry Edwardson, Process Operations Director, comprising representation from Operations, IT system and web designers, Maintenance Managers and Maintenance Strategy Managers.
The Project team set out to:-
- Create a complete and qualitative asset data base
- Establish smarter ways of working Introduce better controls
- Make MAMS more visible and useable across the Business
- Win the hearts and minds of 1200 people
- Introduce a system that was easy, simple but effective.
The company established its own ‘lite’ version of RCM (Reliability Centred Maintenance) a preventative maintenance optimisation technique, designed to improve plant safety and reliability and control and/or reduce maintenance costs. RCM has been used successfully in many other industries due to its technical, unbiased, practical and logical approach to maintenance. The preventive actions directed by an RCM process are focused on preserving the fundamental functions of equipment and are based on the condition of equipment and predicting its remaining life, not just merely on a schedule. By design these actions are intended to be ‘easy, simple and effective’.
To ensure requirements were driven by the business 40 sites were surveyed, using FMEA, a procedure for analysing potential failure modes. Following the surveys several workshops were held with business users to establish a ‘generic view’ to ensure commonality and consistency was achieved across the business.
The full Asset and Work Management process was reviewed to ensure every function was covered.
MAMS now provides a full suite of applications that facilitates:-
- Users can view the asset stock
- Asset Registration / De-Registration and data update
- Raising of re-active work
- Schedule and despatch of work
- Review Work in Progress
- Update and return work
- Review of Management Information.
Latest technologies were considered and it was decided that given today’s contemporary expectations about “look and feel”, applications would be ‘web based’ (Microsoft technology) wherever appropriate and practicable. To this end a team of web developers were engaged as part of the Project team working closely at all times with business users.
A comprehensive MAMS Asset Coding Guide was introduced that details the asset definitions, code components and associated Equipment Group Identifiers. To help the Users it includes diagrams, schematics, process charts and working examples to help/educate the Users to register / de-register an asset. Over a 1000 copies are distributed to the user population. It is maintained by the Optimisation team who are continually refining ‘the guide’ based on User feedback and whenever the system is updated with a revised FMEA.
Ellipse was updated to establish it as the Master Asset Management System. Data is exported from MAMS to feed both the Corporate Capital Estimating tool and the Probability of Failure Modelling tool, PIONEER, used for long term asset planning. This means that data can be trusted and compared across the Region, taking away the ambiguity that existed due to the variety of different data sources that had previously existed.
Processes were designed to be not too prescriptive. The intent is to highlight what tasks are not happening or being done ineffectively.
The Network and associated connectivity was reviewed as a priority and upgraded accordingly. To give MAMS more visibility it had to be accessible!
Information was made accessible to a wider audience.
The Benefits
A complete and qualitative asset data base was established. The data is now recognised throughout the business to be substantially more complete and serves to support maintenance and investment decisions, reducing the dependency on traditional expert judgement.
Users are now confident to use the system and are ‘working’ it to the benefit of the business, e.g, UU’s Asset Management and Delivery team, who lead on capital investment can make more informed investment decisions; failure data is being shared with framework suppliers which is nurturing better relationships/understandings; staff optimisation is greatly improved and the business ethos has moved from ‘reactive to failure’ to ‘failure prevention’.
Accurate route cause analysis enables failures to be identified easier and ‘signposts’ other areas for further investigation or improvement.
Easy, simple but effective solution.
Greater understanding across the business in relation to cost of operation and ownership of Assets.
Through greater understanding and involvement the workforce are more proactive and are more confident to communicate with the business.
Exploiting existing system to provide more value from the investment.
- 185.000 assets on 3500 sites, value of £17 billion
- 300,000 cyclic and 110,000 reactive jobs are carried out each year
- Over 1500 users covering Field Service Engineers and their Managers, Capital Delivery and the Asset Information Department, Process Controllers and Operatives
- On average over 620 ‘Searchlight’ enquires per day
- On average 56 Asset Registration/De-Registration (AR/DR’s) reviews per day
- On average 2452 reactive work orders raised per week
To the Future
The ongoing improvement of the system is seen as evolutionary based on the progressive needs of the business and fuelled by user feedback and the findings of the new improved monitoring processes that have been introduced.
A central optimisation team is being nurtured with responsibility for scheduling, optimisation and small scale investment. The information available from the system is enabling them to prioritise every job, focus on worst performing assets and target investment to improve serviceability.
The next step is to gain a greater involvement from the process operators. Process operators carry out first call maintenance and inspection. Traditionally this information was not collected hence the true whole life cost of ownership was not understood.
The key aim is to understand the true cost of asset ownership.
Proactive maintenance is encouraged with interventions being made prior to asset failure improving process reliability.