SCADA isn’t a panacea

Kristina Foster, Marketing Communications Manager at Sensus and formerly of Schneider Electric has written an interesting post about asset maintenance.

She argues that water companies sometimes mistakenly believe that SCADA is the go-to-system for everything involving monitoring, visualisation, maintenance, and overall operations. Some of the limitations of SCADA are discussed in i2O’s recent thought piece on Network Monitoring. Kristina suggests that other functionality is required on top of SCADA. Or maybe it should be alongside SCADA?

She then focuses in on asset maintenance. She notes that water companies predominantly use reactive and preventative maintenance programmes with their assets. She suggests that beyond these lie, in order: condition-based maintenance, predictive maintenance, and reliability-centred maintenance.

i2O already has a condition based monitoring solution for PRVs that’s used by its clients. It offers a very high degree of accuracy in diagnosing PRV condition, allowing water companies to move from reactive and preventative maintenance programmes which waste time and money on assets which require no maintenance (around 70%), and often fail to address in a timely fashion those that do.

Kristina references her former employer’s solution for monitoring the health of electrical distribution equipment that combines software intelligence for condition-based monitoring with a team of expertise to produce reporting and recommended actions. This is a managed service that i2O is contemplating for clean water distribution networks. Let us know if you’re interested in such a service. Our clients are telling us that they value it but don’t have the time or resource or skills to do it themselves.

This is indeed a trend to watch.