When budgets are tight and each corporate penny is turned three times, making the most of all corporate assets becomes critical to the effective running of an organisation.
Asset performance management is an increasingly important aspect of business, and this emerging market is expected to grow rapidly over the next decade as companies come to understand the value of managing their assets and maximising their performance in an integrated and strategic fashion.
Efficient asset utilisation depends on effective asset performance management, which, in a large organisation the size of Johannesburg City Power, can be a complex undertaking dispersed over an extremely wide area. As intricate as the project may be, City Power needs to have a holistic view of its assets, their state and future spending requirements. This task was assigned to asset management specialist, PRAGMA Siyabonga.
PRAGMA Siyabonga has been involved in conducting an asset identification, verification and recording project for City Power for the past seven months. The deal was originally budgeted to be worth R2.5 million, but has continued ballooning as the scope of the project has expanded. Current projections estimate the final cost of the project to be on the R6 million mark.
Johannesburg City Power`s Anton Booyzen says the initial tender stipulated that PRAGMA Siyabonga would perform an asset identification and verification check at 3 500 sites, but this number soon grew to 10 500. "This increase is mainly due to City Power being an amalgamation of nine separate electricity departments, each with its own records and IT systems - some of them not up to date."
The result of this amalgamation was that in a number of geographical areas City Power did not know what it owned, where it was and what state its assets were in. Where this information was available it was in paper format. The initial aim of the project was to create a complete, accurate and easily manageable record of the organisation`s assets as they are deployed and in use at sites. The City Power sites mainly comprise mini substations (MSS), high voltage chambers (HVC), transformer substations (TSS) and load centres (LCs).
As City Power is a new company tasked with ensuring a regular and reliable supply of electricity, Booyzen says maintenance and capital requirements for the next 20 years needed to be calculated. Having an accurate picture of the current asset status would enable the planners to focus on delivery in the coming years with the minimum number of unpleasant surprises.
"The first task was to locate all the company`s sites," Booyzen adds. "Existing records were found to be only 60% accurate, and many sites weren`t even recorded."
PRAGMA Siyabonga therefore appointed a team of contractors familiar with the Johannesburg area to venture out on missions of discovery. Booyzen adds that a constant problem the project team was faced with was that of sourcing the appropriately skilled people to conduct the site investigations.
Once found and accredited by City Power, these employees were given the goal of finding City Power sites, identifying them and the equipment on site - as well as the status of the equipment - and ensuring all the information makes its way back to head office.
Once sites are located, their physical coordinates are recorded using handheld GPS recorders. "Streets can change," says Booyzen, "but barring a continental drift, coordinates tend to stay the same."
Once located, an external condition assessment is conducted at each site. The examination considers the physical condition of the building, windows, fences, gates, signs and more. The final step is then to carry out an internal assessment of the equipment. This includes writing up a complete record of all the equipment and taking various instrument readings.
Initially, PDAs were used to capture the information. Unfortunately, due to the size of the project, the available resources on these handhelds were soon overloaded and it was then decided to switch to a "paper-based" recording system.
"About 8 000 sites have been completed to date, with some surprising results," notes Booyzen. "Some parts of the network are over 25 years old, requiring immediate action on our part.
"Other critical areas brought to light included transformers that were leaking oil, which could cause serious problems if not addressed. Many safety issues were also discovered, such as signage not found in the appropriate place or not found at all."
The second part of the project is to capture the data into PRAGMA`s ON KEY Asset Performance Management System (APMS), from which it can be extracted and used to determine the appropriate course of action per site or for a region as a whole.
ON KEY can also be used to schedule maintenance tasks and record all maintenance actions taken as well as equipment breakdowns. This builds up a maintenance history that can be easily analysed using ON KEY`s analysis tools to determine areas or parts that regularly present problems.
On the subject of return on investment (ROI), Booyzen says it is tough to quantify the returns enabled by the project since it is difficult to place a value on maintenance and equipment performance. However, he does note the project is helping City Power make better long-term investment decisions, eliminate potential power interruptions in future and highlight critical problems the organisation needs to take care of immediately.
"We now have accurate information with which to plan our long-term capital investment decisions and plan effective preventative maintenance programmes.
Booyzen adds that the company is planning on migrating to the SAP Asset Management module in the near future. "ON KEY and PRAGMA Siyabonga will have made it possible to migrate a database of valuable, accurate information on the state of our assets to incorporate into the SAP system.
"We are extremely happy with the level of professionalism and dedication displayed by PRAGMA Siyabonga," concludes Booyzen, "and even with the increased number of sites, we expect the project to be completed well before the final deadline, which is the end of June 2003.
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