Asset health and resilience are set to be key features in the upcoming Price Review in 2024. In an Expert Focus article for WaterBriefing, Kevin Ockwell, Sales Director from wastewater technology specialist HUBER Technology takes a look at the role strategic equipment hires can play in predictive maintenance activities and explores the issues from a supplier point of view.

Kevin Ockwell: From a supplier point of view , we’re aware that preventative maintenance activity is set to be a key feature of ensuring asset health in PR2024.

Resilience is one of Ofwat’s primary duties – and the regulator is looking to the water companies to shift towards long-term adaptive planning – which includes rigorously assessing and improving their resilience, including existing assets’ health.

Ofwat is also expecting them to take a more holistic, systems-based approach to evaluating the role of asset health in the operational resilience of their systems to support decision-making on the appropriate balance of preventative versus corrective maintenance.

According to a report for Ofwat published in 2017, “a number of water companies are seeking to better understand maintenance and endeavour to establish the optimum balance of planned and reactive maintenance for their non-infrastructure assets.”

All of this feeds in to what I’d like to explore in this article - the role strategic equipment hires can play in predictive maintenance activities.

At HUBER, we’ve worked with the water companies and the Tier 1 companies across a number of AMP capital programmes for the past several decades – so we’ve got plenty of experience and capabilities to bring to bear.

Over the years we’ve amassed a considerable amount of experience and knowledge in helping customers to deal with unexpected problems and unplanned outages. Of course we can always react fast and respond quickly for customers who experience sudden or unexpected operational problems.

Our strategically placed nationwide network in Chippenham, Rotherham, Dundee and Portadownmeans we can deliver a fast response both in terms of expert personnel and quickly getting equipment into place.

Preventative maintenance to ensure asset heath - overlooked potential for strategic hire activity

However, I’d like to draw attention to the somewhat overlooked potential for strategic hire activity to play a key role when sites and equipment are being refurbished to ensure or upgrade asset health.

We’ve been looking carefully at how our customers hire equipment from us in terms of their response to reactive and proactive maintenance activities. Based on this we have taken steps to ensure the stock we hold and the support services that underpin our hire division activities are carefully aligned to meet market requirements.

Despite the relative slowness of the AMP7 programme in getting started, we can see that the market is now moving forward. Part of our own strategic approach is to anticipate how we can meet evolving customer needs via our dedicated hire division. This also includes carefully identifying the type of investment we need to make in the long term to ensure we have the right equipment in place.

We already have an extensive selection of equipment available for hire – and it’s interesting for us to see just how regularly our customers are making use of our services and the equipment which is most regularly in demand.

Over the past year we have taken active steps to add to our hire fleet and these decisions are not taken in isolation – HUBER’s new equipment, aftersales and hire divisions work together to find solutions for customers and projects.

All of the new equipment we are adding to our hire fleet is built to a standard specification which includes remote telemetry monitoring, together with interchangeability with control panels.

Aligning investment in hire equipment with market requirements

We’re aligning our investment in line with market requirements by adding the equipment that we see consistently in use and being hired on a regular basis. We’re also careful to ensure we have an in-built level of available capacity to provide our customers with the confidence that we can help. All of this is of course supported and under-pinned by our parent company, one of the world’s leading providers of wastewater technologies.

With over 50,000 installations now in place worldwide, whatever the problem, you can pretty much guarantee that we have seen something similar before – meaning we can rapidly identify, diagnose and rectify.

This expertise also affords us the ability to configure a bespoke solution where necessary tailored to individual site requirements. We don’t just say – here’s your equipment there you go. We want to ensure that it works and will spend time paying attention to the problem and sorting out the best solution for the job. We won’t over-promise and under-deliver.

Typically, a lot of our hires come through the water companies via their providers working on the capital Tier 1 schemes – so we’re very used to working in tandem on the collaborative basis which is so often needed in both reactive and proactive maintenance and repair work.

Our hire work ranges from a straightforward like for like replacement, to a complex project where understanding the processes both upstream and downstream of where the hire equipment which is needed is key to finding the right solution.

Interestingly, during the last two years we’ve seen increasing uptake of both our Ro9 (combined screening) units on a hire basis and our Ro3 sewage sludge input screens which are now consistently in demand. Some of this equipment is also going out on long –term hire – in some instances up to two years or more.

So our investment decisions are a considered balancing act - understanding how much to invest in which type of asset and when.

We monitor the market on an ongoing basis and will continue to add further capacity to our fleet via our phased investment programme - our hire business will continue to grow and develop in line with market requirements.

The fact that we're specialists and expert in what we do is one of our particular strengths and this extends to our equipment hire services. We tailor our offering very carefully to meet the requirements of the market and our customers.

Asset health - developing a more collaborative partnership approach to hire activity

In my view, it is a question of developing a more collaborative partnership approach to hire activity which could really help the water companies and their Tier 1 providers in terms of strengthening asset health and resilience.

To take one typical example of how we can help a client, a recent project our Hire Business Manager, Kevin Benson worked on and was involved with two HUBER STRAINPRESS® at a wastewater treatment works, which for various reasons were out of action for some time. He developed a specialist bespoke solution using our Ro3 screen which bypassed the screens and removed the inconvenience of interim tanker movements and the associated costs. This involved working with another supplier to integrate a pump into our system to move the screened sludge in to a high holding tank.

We don’t just want to hire equipment out, we are also passionate about understanding the problem to come up with a solution that really works for our customers - the extra specialism we can bring to tackling complex issues.

We focus on thinking intelligently – so Kevin’s approach was to develop and customise, and in the process it expanded the capability of a standard machine as well.

We make an effort to understand where that particular piece of equipment sits in the context of the whole system, both upstream and downstream of the whole process, which is where we can bring massive added value to helping the client in a difficult situation.

And as Kevin says, it wasn’t just about offering a standard operational hire solution – it was also about being cash wise and providing a commercial beneficial solution as well.

Ofwat is currently developing its PR24 methodology for publication in July 2022, which will be key to how the water companies develop their five year business plans for AMP8.

AMP8 - taking a strategic approach to incorporating a clearly defined hire strategy into proactive asset health maintenance

So why is hire important in the scheme of things? To sum up, in my view it’s possibly an overlooked area which is now starting to come into its own – a trend which is set to continue in AMP8.

As it develops its PR24 methodology, Ofwat’s thinking on resilience will undoubtedly have been influenced by a report it commissioned in 2017 – Targeted Review of Asset Health and Resilience in the Water Industry – which makes repeated reference to preventative and predictive maintenance strategies.

The report states:

“It is important that the complexities of the role played by non-infrastructure assets are understood, and that effective maintenance regimes are in place. It is likely that there are major opportunities for optimising maintenance strategies and improving efficiency through a better understanding of asset health and resilience….

"Some assets are maintainable and maintenance regime can influence failure probability. When an asset fails, service can be disrupted. However, the speed with which the company responds; the availability of another asset that can compensate; the presence of storage or alternative routing may mean that asset failure does not impact significantly on service.”

Which is where the planned scheduling of equipment hire comes in.

Whatever you want to call it, proactive maintenance, condition based maintenance, predictive maintenance - timely and forward-thinking intervention can undoubtedly extend and enhance asset life in a cost beneficial way.It can also help to avoid costly repairs or failures which have significant negative impacts on daily operational activities.

What I’d really like readers to have as the key take away is how water companies and their principal contractors can optimise their operational resilience activities by taking a strategic approach to incorporating a clearly defined hire strategy into their proactive asset health maintenance activity.