ARQ worked with North East Water to understand the key challenges they were facing with their sewer pumps operational efficiency.
Summary of the key challenges:
Agility Access
North East Water were looking to collaborate the existing asset management system to the cloud, to enable their front-line engineers to check the sewer pumps status from mobile devices and determine in advance where and when maintenance of individual pumps would be required.
Security
As a utility organisation aligned with the public sector, safely storing and transferring sensitive data is a key priority for North East Water. North East Water wanted to have their new cloud-based system running upon the existing supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) infrastructure so that the system integrity would be maintained and security compliant.
Balance Workload
In the water utility industry, it can be challenging to proactively plan when to inspect pumps without any real time information on the pumps conditions. North East Water were facing this challenge and were only aware of issues with their sewer pumps after they had occurred. This resulted in the operation team being called out at all different hours to locate the problem and fix it at soon as possible. A team member from North East Water Wangaratta Operation stated “Sometimes I get called to check a pump, 10 minutes before my shift ends”. According to historic data the situation can sometimes be a lot worse with one of the sewer pumps breaking at 4am on Saturday.