Vital Energi takes a proactive, predictive approach to operational maintenance

Vital Energi is a leading innovator in efficient energy provision, and a catalyst for the development of new and sustainable ways of supplying heat and power for public and private sector clients. The company is based in Blackburn, Lancashire, and has clients throughout the UK.

The company’s 160 employees design, build, operate and maintain low carbon solutions based on a wide range of technologies, including combined heat and power (CHP), biomass, waste-to-energy and solar energy. These innovative solutions provide an energy-efficient source of heat, power and cooling to museums, hospitals, airports, prisons, military facilities, housing associations and local authorities across the country.

A growing business
“In recent years, the operation and maintenance side of the business has seen considerable growth,” comments Bernard Takala, O&M Mechanical Systems Engineer at Vital Energi. “Every day, our engineers visit client sites to carry out maintenance jobs, take meter readings, and perform other routine checks.”

For the first few years of its existence, the operation and maintenance department ran its day-to-day operations in a largely decentralised manner. The engineers maintained spreadsheets that recorded the jobs they worked on each day, and generally managed their own workload. This was adequate on an operational basis, but was becoming unsustainable as the department grew. Moreover, it did not provide the level of transparency that the company’s management required.

Finding the right solution
“The company decided to invest in an IT system that would help to introduce a more process-driven approach to maintenance management,” explains Takala. “The idea was to find a system that could start small, and then be extended easily as new requirements were defined. We didn’t want an expensive system that required a lengthy project and a ‘big-bang’ implementation: we wanted to get a solution in place for work order management, and then add more modules when we needed them.”

The company’s Operation and Maintenance Manager consulted SRO Solutions, an IBM Business Partner that specialises in asset management projects, about finding a suitable solution.

Steve Driver, Director of SRO Solutions, comments: “We recommended IBM Maximo Asset Management as an ideal solution for Vital Energi. A lot of small and mid-sized companies think Maximo is an expensive enterprise-level solution that they can’t afford, or that it will be too large and complex for them to manage. But in reality, the software and the licensing terms are both flexible enough to offer an entry point for organisations of all sizes – so they can implement the modules they need without embarking on a long and costly implementation project.”

Streamlining maintenance processes
Vital Energi decided to go ahead with the project, and worked with SRO Solutions to implement the work order management, planned maintenance and job planning modules of IBM Maximo Asset Management. The solution provides a web-based portal that engineers can access via their laptops, even when they are working at client sites.

The portal allows the engineers to log into a dashboard that displays a list of all the work orders that are assigned to them for the next two weeks, as well as any that are more than a week overdue. The engineers can then click through to view individual work orders, see risk assessments, and check that they have obtained the appropriate ‘Permit to Work’ in accordance with UK health and safety legislation. Once they have completed the job, they can submit their report directly into the Maximo portal, where it may be viewed by other engineers and managers.

The value of visibility
“One of the best things about the new solution is visibility,” explains Takala. “If the same problem occurs at different sites, the engineers can check to see whether their colleagues have already come up with a solution for it – so they don’t have to re-invent the wheel.

“Moreover, we are starting to introduce trend analysis, which will help managers get a better understanding of the whole maintenance process. Perhaps they might see that a certain component is failing frequently across all the sites. With this information, they can make good decisions that affect the whole company – for example, they might decide to set a policy to increase the frequency of planned maintenance for that component, or they might even feed the information back to the product development team to see if it can be redesigned to eliminate the problem.”

Improving efficiency and performance
The engineers’ reports now include data such as the spare parts and materials that the engineer has used to complete the work order, as well as how much time they spent on the job. This data will help the company manage its spare parts inventory more efficiently, and will also show how effective individual engineers are at working on particular types of jobs.

“We have already seen a significant improvement in engineers’ performance, mainly due to the improvement in the way we manage planned maintenance,” says Takala. “Since we can automatically schedule maintenance at appropriate intervals for each type of asset, we can ensure that everything is checked regularly, and that problems can be addressed before they become serious. As a result we’ve seen the incidence of break/fix maintenance jobs fall to just five percent of our total maintenance workload – so our clients are getting a much better level of service with far fewer breakdowns.”

Creating an end-to-end process
The company has now introduced an additional Maximo module to handle service request management.

“At the moment we’re mostly using the service request management module to handle internal IT requests for our employees – but in the longer term we plan to encourage our clients to use it to log service requests for their own sites,” says Takala. “So if the manager of an apartment block finds that the heating isn’t working properly, they will be able to log into the portal or email a dedicated service request email address. This will create a service request that generates a work order in Maximo and hence, the whole process becomes automated.”

Innovative smart metering
A further innovation is the integration of Maximo with smart metering equipment. The company needs to monitor electricity and gas usage at client sites to ensure that its billing is accurate. This has traditionally required an engineer to visit the site to read the meter, and then report the reading to headquarters. Now, the smart meters will automatically send readings into the Maximo system, reducing time and effort and increasing accuracy, while allowing engineers to concentrate on more valuable work.

“Maximo Asset Management has already proven its value as a tool for our operation and maintenance department, and we are very keen to keep working with the SRO Solutions team to extend the platform further,” concludes Takala. “SRO is a true partner: they really understand our business and help us get the most out of our investment in the Maximo software.”