Jemena owns and operates a diverse portfolio of energy assets across northern Australia and Australia’s east coast. With more than $11.5 billion worth of major utility infrastructure, Jemena supplies over 1.7 million households and businesses with essential services every day.
“The key benefit of going digital is that it provides visibility of the entire workflow to all necessary participants and gives a consolidated view across multiple areas at one time.”
Andrew Barnard Services platforms manager, Jemena
Challenge
Assembling the right resources at the right location is critical in ensuring asset maintenance is undertaken efficiently. It is an issue that organisations tasked with running complex and geographically diverse asset infrastructures face on a daily basis. With thousands of critical assets to maintain and strict performance benchmarks to uphold, the impact of poorly coordinated maintenance resources can be significant — both in terms of costs and damage to reputation.
Zinfra, Jemena’s service execution organisation, commenced work on an operations and maintenance contract across the entire United Energy electricity network in Victoria. As a way of driving best of breed practice with a third-party organisation, Zinfra wanted to eliminate the traditional paper-based methods of issuing work assignments and allocating resources. By embedding digitisation, a holistic view of all parties and all locations involved in the contract could be enabled to provide improved resource allocation and flexibility.
Solution
Jemena engaged DXC to help them design, plan and implement SAP’s Multi Resource Scheduling (MRS) solution, providing Zinfra with the ability to digitise its maintenance and work assignments and optimise its resource scheduling.
SAP Multi Resource Scheduling (MRS) is a resource management solution for services, plant maintenance and project businesses that increases resource utilisation and transparency across maintenance units. It optimises resource assignments (by travel times, priority, qualifications, etc.) and enables organisations to manage resource requests more efficiently, leading to increased customer satisfaction
“We are committed to the solution, because we can see the long-term benefits, but that will only happen if we make it easy for our workforce to transition to the new digital system. It also ensures we modify the design of the next rollout based on the real life learnings of the previous deployment.”
Erik Knol Asset and service productline manager, Jemena
Removal of time-consuming manual processes
The issue with paper-based work order and resource allocation is that paper can only be in one place at a time, says Andrew Barnard, Jemena services platforms manager.
"The key benefit of going digital is that it provides visibility of the entire workflow to all necessary participants and gives a consolidated view across multiple areas at one time.”
Jemena/Zinfra now has a single set of processes for planning and scheduling, giving it a centralised view of all work being undertaken. This has simplified activities and given management near real-time, accurate data about the planning, scheduling and despatch of work assignments.
A compelling value proposition
The implementation has embedded greater consistency in Jemena/Zinfra’s processes across its various depots, which prior to this, undertook resource allocation and scheduling using whiteboards and spreadsheets. These systems were siloed and required duplicate effort to update and share information. The increased standardisation has meant Jemena/Zinfra can quickly identify and respond to opportunities and challenges in its work and resource allocation activities.
“The SAP MRS value proposition rests in our ability to timestamp all the work activities that are undertaken,” says Barnard. “We can now start to understand the intricacies of the issues and get a real grip on the time it takes to do each step in the workflow. The data we can access gives us insights into whether we are issuing the right work orders and giving our crews the right equipment and resources.”
“Armed with the new digital information we can see a roadmap of improvements ahead. With the technology up and running, people can see it is successful and getting user buy-in.”
Erik Knol Asset and service productline manager, Jemena
Embedding the solution for success
Jemena/Zinfra now has a full planning, scheduling and despatch capability thanks to the SAP MRS software. The solution was integrated with Jemena/Zinfra’s key line of business systems, including Wisenet (its skills and qualifications platform), SAP HR (for core personnel information), and mWorkOrder (mobile work order despatches), and mWorkOrder (mobile work order despatches), giving maintenance crews the ability to receive work orders on tablets in the field.
The solution was carefully implemented with a comprehensive change management plan undertaken to ensure uptake within the business. This consisted of a detailed change impact assessment, a project communications campaign (weekly change network forums, leadership messages, project updates, and role-based posters articulating key changes for each role impacted by the project), training, business engagement, as well as go-live support.
Eric Knol, Jemena asset and service product line manager says one of the key learnings was to provide extended adoption and embedment support by retaining specialist SAP MRS support on site to help users with the transition. “We are committed to the solution, because we can see the long-term benefits, but that will only happen if we make it easy for our workforce to transition to the new digital system. It also ensures we modify the design of the next rollout based on the real life learnings of the previous deployment.”
Roadmap of benefits ahead
With SAP MRS now integrated with mWorkOrder and various other systems, Jemena/Zinfra is set to leverage the data it now has at its fingertips to better optimise its resource allocations. It is now initiating a new project, Smart Work Orders, which will see it create ‘packages’ of work orders, further streamlining the execution of work orders and maintenance tasks.
Armed with information from the SAP MRS system, Jemena/Zinfra will be able to bundle work assignments together to maximise the work undertaken at a particular location. This will not only ensure that the right people, and right tools are available at the right time, it will also minimise disruption for its customers — an important measure of any technology deployment.
“We have met our first challenge of digitising the paper-based processes,” says Knol. “Armed with the new digital information we can see a roadmap of improvements ahead. With the technology up and running, peoplecan see it is successful and gettinguser buy-in.”