Maximo Implementation – UK Utility
From Chaos to Control: How IBM Maximo helped UK Utility ride its wave of unstructured data
A UK utility tackled fragmented data and failing infrastructure with an integrated asset management system. By leveraging IBM Maximo, they improved efficiency, minimized outages, and extended asset life, while achieving regulatory compliance and setting a new standard for operational excellence.
Summary
With almost 4 million customers, an Electricity Utility faced asset management challenges due to fragmented data and outdated systems, causing outages, fines, and reputational harm. Cohesive implemented IBM Maximo to create an integrated Master Asset Registry, enabling condition-based risk management. The system improved efficiency, extended asset lifecycles, reduced outages, enhanced customer satisfaction, minimized fines, achieved regulatory compliance and even reaped rewards from the National Regulator’s Incentive Scheme.
Solutions
Our Solution
Deploying IBM Maximo as the enterprise asset management system, Cohesive also recommended integrating all asset registers into an IBM Maximo Master Asset Registry (MAR). To ensure the MAR reflected the real world, teams of the Utility provider were trained in Maximo with mobile devices to create a MAR that integrates all operational and asset data with GIS descriptions of every asset location.
In addition, the risks of failure of each asset were captured, not only in terms of the asset itself but of its impact on the Utility network and its clients.
It was a massive exercise: Each span of cable and every pole was described with information on the condition of each pole, every cable span, and every sub-station. This was integrated with client and electricity usage data, thereby transforming each pole and each stretch of cable from a pure physical asset into an operational asset and risk factor.
A million wooden poles supporting the overhead cable network were thereby ranked by their criticality for electricity delivery to clients. To paraphrase George Orwell’s Animal Farm: “Some poles are more equal than other poles.”
Not a single pole is excluded from a rigorous condition inspection regime with staff physically capturing and recording the pole’s condition, with 68 different measuring points captured for every pole.
These include
• Is the pole upright or leaning?
• What is the condition of the stays?
• And the stay anchors?
• Is there woodpecker damage?
• Is the pole rotten?
• If so, how bad is the damage?
• Are safety signs and anti-climb measures installed correctly?
The 68 measuring points answer the question about the “life expectancy” of every pole. The outage, and therefore loss of not only revenue but also reputation loss, is thereby limited. Similar regimes were put in place for sub-station inspection and all other asset categories.
Teams of the utility’s workforce capture this data in foot patrols with Maximo-enabled mobile devices. This is automatically reconciled with the data from the preceding 4 years, as well as operational data reflecting outages that involved those sections of the network and the poles in that section.
The Client Benefits
The Utility’s meticulous adherence to its integrated asset management system resulted in:
- Fewer outages through pole or cable failure
- Quicker restoration of supply where it matters most, due to a risk to client and income analyses
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Extended life expectancy of assets and a healthier infrastructure asset system
- Making informed decisions about asset investments
- Minimising fines and penalties from Ofgem
- Reaping the rewards from the regulator’s incentive scheme
Wooden poles have a utility life of 40-50 years, but with this condition-based risk management system (CBRM) in place, the life expectancy of a significant percentage of the poles has been extended whilst timely replacement of those that would not last can be arranged.
The application of Maximo helped with the Utility’s implementation of ISO 55000, enabling them to convince the regulator that it is an energy network and distribution entity providing reliable services in a cost-effective manner to its clients.
The implementation of an integrated APM enabled this firm to ride the wave of data, which stands in stark contrast to the operations of several other network operators in the UK.