Improved accuracy and reduced cost of asset maintenance planning
Client:
Leading Australian Energy SupplierChallenge:
- Manual asset maintenance management processes were unreliable and labour intensive
- A need for improved forward planning accuracy at a lower cost
- Insight into how actual maintenance costs align with plan was inconsistent and difficult to provide
Solution:
- The implementation of a fully integrated cloud-based solution to replace the existing error prone, Excel-based approach
- DXC Red Rock’s Asset Maintenance Planning Accelerate Templates used to leverage the power of Oracle PBCS
- With best practice dashboards and visualisations the cloud-based solution can be accessed across multiple platforms
Results:
- Accurate forward planning of major asset maintenance events including shutdowns
- Trusted by users with transparency across the entire process, and flexibility to adjust timing and costs
- Improved financial management and better insight into cost-effective ways to conduct asset maintenance
This leading Australian energy supplier explores, generates, and delivers electricity, natural gas and LPG solutions both locally and internationally. The company’s gas division sought to transform its existing, error prone, manual, Excel-based approach to asset maintenance management. A fundamental change was required to automate and improve processes, and deliver transparency, standardisation, accountability and cost savings.
Challenge
With significant investments across 20 sites containing the infrastructure and equipment required to explore, store and distribute natural gas, the annual cost associated with maintaining those assets was 30% of total operating costs. The existing processes to plan and report asset maintenance costs were manual and error prone. Inaccuracies in forecasting, with actual values far from those predicted, made it unreliable, labour intensive and difficult to plan for the future.
The primary focus of this project was to reduce costs, improve consistency, and increase the accuracy of asset maintenance planning and budgeting. This required automation of procedures to allow the organisation to perform better tracking of activities, accurate forward planning and improved analysis of costs.
Solution
The energy company went to market for an asset maintenance management solution, with Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) fitting the bill. Oracle invited DXC Red Rock to demonstrate how its pre-built Accelerate Templates would enable the client to unlock and harness all of PBCS’s capabilities.
Leveraging the standard software with best practice approaches, DXC Red Rock’s Accelerate Templates are designed for specific industries to meet particular needs, while expediting a company’s migration, adoption and ROI journey. The Accelerate Templates used in the project integrate with any asset maintenance system, allowing any organisation to take advantage of their functionality.
The cloud-based solution automated the planning process for the entire asset maintenance management process, leading to the reduction of individual maintenance task costs and minimising errors. While the previous system was standalone and lacked integration with the broader supply chain and finance systems, the new system is fully integrated.
While DXC had previously delivered this value add solution to other asset intensive organisations, this was the first cloud-based solution delivered in Australia and globally.
Benefits
The project was delivered over six months with ROI delivered many times over since. Benefits delivered to date include:
- Transparency across the whole asset maintenance management process with improved unity between maintenance and finance teams and one consistent data set;
- Clarity over the most cost-effective way to conduct asset maintenance with maintenance able to focus on task level and finance able to access data in traditional accounts and cost centres;
- The ability to perform unlimited “what if” analysis to inform asset maintenance decisions;
- Improved management of shutdowns, breakdowns, and other major events with flexibility to re-assign timings and costs;
- Improved workforce planning with projection of forward maintenance resource demands overlayed with current team size to assess potential capacity gaps or surpluses;
- Improved reliability on time and on budget of the maintenance planning process ensuring all necessary resources are available ‘just in time’, according to the maintenance schedule;
- Detailed view of exactly where in the infrastructure/equipment a cost overrun occurred for fast remediation;
- Automated daily actual dashboard reporting for immediate action, rather than previously ad hoc manual calculations using multiple spreadsheets; and,
- A view of expenses by contractor consolidated across sites to facilitate improved individual contractor management and negotiation power.