Improved accuracy and reduced cost of asset maintenance planning

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.

Data inaccuracies made future planning difficult

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 key plannedand unplanned activities, such asmajor shutdowns or unscheduledmaintenance;
• Accurate forward planning overmultiple years with the abilityto perform “what if” analysis todetermine potential outcomes ofdifferent actions;
• Analysis to provide a clear picture ofactual costs versus budget, and whataffected them, up or down.

The selection process

The energy company went to market for an asset maintenance management solution, with Oracle Planning fitting the bill. Oracle invited DXC Technology to demonstrate how its pre-built Accelerate Templates would enable the client to unlock and harness all of Oracle Planning’s capabilities.

DXC Technology’s Practice for Oracle is the largest independent provider of Oracle consulting and managed services in Australia and New Zealand. With a full continuum of services around Oracle’s integrated suite of applications, platform services, and engineered systems, DXC provides dynamic technology leadership in delivering Oracle cloud solutions.

Leveraging the standard software with best practice approaches, DXC’s Accelerate Templates are designed for specific industries to meet particular needs, while expediting a company’s migration, adoption and ROI journey.

Steve Hitchman, analytics solution director, from DXC’s Practice for Oracle explained, “Several solutions had already been evaluated by the client. Initially, they believed Oracle Planning did not meet their needs, however the innovative IP that DXC was able to offer with our pre-built templates was a game changer during the evaluation process. Once we demonstrated the value-add the Accelerate Template provided, the company knew it was a perfect fit.”

Solution

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. Users access the application across multiple platforms including mobile devices, with best practice dashboards and visualisations driving excellent user experience, and automated daily reporting increasing business-wide accountability. The ability to perform unlimited “what if” analysis across multiple scenarios helps optimise asset life, costs, and timing of maintenance.

Alignment of actual data from the maintenance application and general ledger also allows users to plan in the dashboard with the added capacity to generate helpful outputs such as ‘top five variances by major task’, and reforecast the budget impact of timing changes over coming months.

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.

The Accelerate Templates used in the project integrate with any asset maintenance system, allowing any organisation to take advantage of their functionality.

Results

Change management is key to any successful transformational project especially where technology is used to replace previously manual processes. This advanced asset maintenance management approach includes powerful analytics that allow for processing the enormous quantity of data generated and provide more meaningful and useful information for better decision making. This change was well managed by the project team, with excellent results seen almost immediately upon ‘go live’. The quality, timeliness, and depth of information has improved dramatically with the entire maintenance team utilising the system to ensure accurate planning and forecasting of asset maintenance. 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 overlaid 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.
  

What the future sees

The project was delivered over six months with ROI delivered many times over since. The focus now centres on continuous improvement, further consolidation and teamwork between maintenance management and finance teams to drive cost and quality efficiencies. The finance team is also assessing how the solution might be extended to deliver enterprise planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting capabilities across the entire organisation.

In addition, automated matching of maintenance tasks to purchase orders was recently implemented to improve billing accuracy and timeliness, while contributing to better future planning and forecasting. The ability to view expenses by contractor across multiple sites is another area currently under development. Once implemented this will drive further cost-savings with the opportunity to negotiate contracts from a more informed position.