Choose a planned maintenance program

Bob Phillips, principal legislation engineer at Southern Water, has recently spoken about the efforts of the company to change their maintenance methods in order to become more efficient and cost-effective.

Southern Water are attempting to transition from a hugely reactive maintenance effort, in which work is done to fix failures that have already occurred, to a predictive schedule.  It is estimated 73% of the company’s maintenance activities are currently reactive, which is, worryingly, fairly standard throughout the water and wastewater industry.

Mr Phillips correctly pointed out that, “A planned maintenance environment is more cost-effective for customers.” He also presented figures to show how a typical utility budget of £3.5 million could be reduced by almost a third by changing  the way maintenance is approached. His aim is to move on from the current practices where Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) accounts for 10% of maintenance work, preventative maintenance accounts for 17% and reactive accounts for a huge 73%. He wants to achieve a more balanced maintenance practice in which RCM still accounts for 10%, but predictive accounts for 40%, and preventative counts for 30%, bringing the reliance on reactive down to just 20%.

Companies need to understand how their assets are performing and that means that a huge amount of data is needed to highlight potential faults and areas of improvements. Data collected for the purpose of a maintenance schedule needs to monitor the condition of machinery, and commonly measures levels of temperature, pressure and vibration.

Vibration sensors (accelerometers) can be fitted to machinery and will collect data that demonstrates if there are abnormal levels of vibration that would suggest a failure is likely to occur soon.