With its purchase of MAXIMO Umgeni Water, the largest water authority in KwaZulu Natal, became the third water utility in South Africa that invested in MAXIMO for work and asset maintenance management.
Umgeni Water purchased a 15 user MAXIMO license from Pretoria based Enterprise Asset Management solutions provider MST. The implementation of MAXIMO is part of Umgeni Water`s overall strategy to ensure a reliable water supply to all its customers.
MST`s other MAXIMO clients are Rand Water and Goudveld Water.
Umgeni Water`s area of supply covers some 24 000 square kilometers with the main boundaries being the Indian Ocean in the East, the Tugela and Mooi Rivers in the North, the Drakensberg Mountains in the West and the Mkomazi and Mzimkulu Rivers in the South. It is involved in a broad range of water services, but its core business lies in bulk storage, treatment and supply of water to towns and cities in its area. It is also responsible for wastewater treatment and reticulation of treated water to rural and peri-urban communities.
Employing some 1300 staff, Umgeni Water operates and maintains eight major storage dams, nine wastewater works and nine waterworks, a number of pump stations and reservoirs, several tunnels and an extensive network of pipelines and aqueducts which transport the water to the customers.
Service functions are mainly centralised whilst operations is decentralised into two regions, namely Inland and Coastal.
Umgeni Water for the first time made contact with MST through IBM, expressing a need to replace all their archaic systems and to add new systems where required.
The positive results Rand Water started to obtain after implementing MAXIMO made Umgeni take note. Sunil Maharaj, Coastal Maintenance Manager for Umgeni Water, championed the process of acquiring a maintenance management system.
According to Mr Maharaj Umgeni Water drew up a very stringent user requirement specification containing data entities, reporting requirements and business processes. It subsequently went out on tender to seven suppliers. In April last year MAXIMO and two other systems were short-listed.
"An important requirement was that we were looking for an enterprise wide maintenance solution. Umgeni also favoured the centralised deployment option with a preference for an international `Best-of-Breed` system that could interface with our other business systems," Mr Maharaj said.
Subsequently technology stress tests were performed on the short listed systems and the function cost ratio scrutinised. MAXIMO emerged as the overall preferred system and will be deployed centrally with remote thin clients accessing MAXIMO as and when needed.
The benefits Umgeni Water envisages with using MAXIMO is:
To maintain an equipment and vehicle register
To define planned maintenance schedules for water works, equipment and vehicles
To raise planned and unplanned job cards
To do detail reporting on the cost of maintaining equipment and vehicles
To interface with existing Umgeni Water business systems
As part of the MAXIMO consulting project a MAXIMO Centre of Excellence is going to be established at the Umgeni Water head office in Pietermaritzburg where designated project people from Umgeni Water can work together with MST consultants on the implementation. A clear project responsibility and accountability hierarchy within these operations has been identified.
A significant part of the project is dedicated to the development of a solution for Umgeni Water to manage its vehicle fleet.
Bouke Spoelstra, MST`s Engagement Manager, says the implementation methodology that is followed is based on implementation participation as a structured team consisting of Umgeni and MST resources.
"Experience has indicated that this is the most frequent service required by our clients. It brings together MST experience in MAXIMO implementation and maintenance processes with the client`s maintenance engineering experience. A well balanced project team will capitalise on the joint experience to implement the system successfully," he said.
( Other large water utilities worldwide that are using MAXIMO are Thames Water International in the UK, New Foundland Labrador and Hydro in Canada, Lionnaise Des Eaux in France, Sydney Water Corporation in Australia and the Virgin Island Water and Power Authority.
Share