Waternet is the water cycle company responsible for the water cycle of the municipality of Amsterdam and part of the provinces of North-Holland and Utrecht. In addition to sewage treatment and surface water management, Waternet also provides sewage and drinking water in the area. This provides a large portfolio of assets. The water company’s maintenance organization copes with challenges such as the aging of its technical staff, digitalization and increasing pressure on the assets due to climate change, among other things. Together with MaxGrip, Waternet developed ‘Clustered Maintenance’ to be able to do smarter maintenance and thus better anticipate those challenges.

Case study – highlights

Approach

Processes
Clustered Maintenance, therefore, provides structure and clarity to the maintenance organization. To implement Clustered Maintenance, we work with Waternet on:

  1. Checking and optimizing current maintenance concepts;
  2. Mapping the available capacity;
  3. Developing work processes (team meetings, checklists, formats, etc.);
  4. Making maintenance cluster-proof: implement adjustments such as the separation between plannable and non-plannable maintenance;
  5. Clustering maintenance concepts per location and per asset;
  6. Drawing up maintenance planning appropriate to Clustered Maintenance;
  7. Assisting Waternet’s organization in the execution of Clustered Maintenance; focus on getting and keeping the PDCA loop going.

People
In order to have Clustered Maintenance adopted internally, a lot of attention is paid to organizational change. Clustered Maintenance involves working in multidisciplinary teams that work flexibly across the locations. Knowledge is better facilitated through collaboration in teams with employees from maintenance, operations, production and projects. In addition, the team fulfills a flying keep function. Erwin de Witt, MaxGrip consultant and project leader: “At its core, the assets of drinking water and sewage installations do not differ much. It is therefore perfectly possible to deploy employees flexibly to locations and the different types of installations. It broadens and deepens the knowledge and skills of employees.” MaxGrip initiates collaboration between the departments and ensures that Clustered Maintenance is widely supported within the organization; not only in the technical department, production/ operations also play a role in Clustered Maintenance.

Results

The project of Clustered Maintenance is ongoing. This way of working is known as a best practice among water companies in the Netherlands. So far the achievements are manifold. They include:

  • The execution of the yearly Preventive Maintenance scope has increased from 70 to 95%
  • 10% cost savings on contractors and the maintenance scope is executed with less manpower
  • Organizational change realized with a lot of stakeholder management

Get in touch.

Alex Lemuz

Alex Lemuz
Sales Manager - Americas

alex.lemuz@maxgrip.com
T: +1 832-933-1602

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