Johannesburg, 29 Aug 2006
Bloem Water, the largest water utility in the Free State, recently decided to improve service delivery by means of adopting a best practice maintenance strategy to ensure equipment reliability.
MAXIMO, the best of breed enterprise asset management solution in the market according to Gartner, will be used to drive this strategy. This decision follows the successful utilisation of MAXIMO Release 4.11 for procurement and inventory management at the central depot in Bloemfontein.
In order to improve business benefits and low cost of ownership resulting from MAXIMO, the scope of the enhancement project was extended to include the move from a client-server technology platform to full Java certified Web architecture with its proven benefits for multi-site utilities organisations. The fully Web architecture MAXIMO release 5 will enable Bloem Water to manage all asset groups, fleet, plant and facilities on a single platform, thereby bringing consolidation of business applications.
"We wanted to move to a proactive service delivery organisation and our maintenance strategies needed to reflect our vision. An important requirement was that we were looking for an enterprise wide maintenance solution. Bloem Water also favoured MAXIMO`S centralised deployment option and we had a preference for an international `best-of-breed` system with open architecture to interface with our other business systems," says Maintenance Manager, Mr De Klerk.
Michiel Ferreira, IST Data`s Project Manager at Bloem Water, says the project methodology followed was based on implementation participation as a structured team consisting of Bloem Water and IST Data resources.
"Experience has indicated that this is the most frequent service required by our clients. It brings together IST Data`s experience in MAXIMO implementation and maintenance processes with the client`s maintenance engineering and industry experience. A well balanced project team will capitalise on the joint experience to implement the system successfully."
In this distributed environment MAXIMO has been used for more than three years for inventory and procurement management driving the supply chain of all materials, from consumables, engineering parts and operational material. Due to the nature of the organisation, MAXIMO supports multiple site stores managing internal transfers while replenishment is run from a centralised procurement office.
Henk Smit, IT Manager at Bloem Water, says MAXIMO`s business process support and querying capabilities give management visibility into labour utilisation and plant performance. "MAXIMO enables us to measure the effectiveness of our maintenance department and our IT support desk on issues such as response time, backlog and utilisation of human resources. We can monitor organisational performance from user-defined KPI screens, immediately identify problem areas and constraints and implement timeous corrective action."
According to De Klerk, the enhancement of Maximo resulted in the following benefits:
* An up to date equipment and vehicle register.
* Standards for planned maintenance schedules for water works, equipment and vehicles.
* Planning, scheduling and assigning of all work form inspections, preventive maintenance to emergency repairs.
* Detailed reporting on the lifecycle cost of equipment and vehicles.
Bloem Water envisages to integrate MAXIMO into the other Bloem Water business systems such as SCADA, for the seamless transfer of equipment performance data.
Ferreira says MAXIMO is internationally the most widely used maintenance management software system for water utilities. "Local water utilities using MAXIMO include Rand Water, Umgeni Water and Sedibeng Water. Other global water utilities using MAXIMO successfully include Thames Water International in the UK, Newfoundland Labrador and Hydro in Canada, Lyonnaise Des Eaux in France, Sydney Water Corporation in Australia and the Virgin Island Water and Power Authority."
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