RS releases Maintaining the Flow water and wastewater industry report

Maintaining the Flow, a water and wastewater industry report, delves into growing environmental and operational challenges like ageing assets and infrastructure, skills and labour shortages, extreme weather and environmental goals. It references industry information and data from a variety of sources including Water UK, British Water, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA).

With public trust at a low point and pressures including regulatory scrutiny, RS’s report suggests that the critical quest to keep water flowing can be greatly aided by collaboration across the supply chain, and optimising specialist expertise.

"The water and wastewater industry infrastructure features many long-life assets. And while companies are currently installing infrastructure made from longer lasting materials, you cannot simply replace the whole system, so often you’re dealing with ageing infrastructure," said Chris Cruise, industry sector manager for utilities at RS. 

"This has major implications in terms of the amount of maintenance required. Older assets increasingly require more maintenance to remain operational. It also has implications in terms of costly downtime."

A maintenance engineering report from RS, Performance in Focus, highlighted that 52% of engineers working in the utilities sector spend more than 100 hours per week on unscheduled downtime.

The report suggests using solutions providers for maintenance elements like calibration to keep equipment accurate and reliable, and lubrication and oil condition monitoring, to improve asset performance and extend asset life. Energy management field services can also help to reduce costs and greenhouse gas emissions by identifying areas for improvement, which is useful for the energy-intensive processes water and wastewater companies have.

“These value-added services keep assets running longer for less because you’ll buy fewer parts, consumables, and even tools. They help to reduce costly downtime and exposure to risk for your workers even further, as the water and wastewater industry is a high-risk place to work. You are then also able to better optimise engineers’ time, redeploying them to other tasks. This is very beneficial in a time of skills’ shortages.”

RS helped solve an issue for a water and wastewater customer employing more than 1,000 engineers across six different engineering crafts, each of whom carries around 100 items of commonly used equipment. With no standardised toolkit for any of them, tools were purchased individually and through different suppliers. This created multiple, lengthy purchase order processes and often unsuitable or non-compliant items were sourced.

RS developed a standardised approved toolkit list for each of the six crafts, and checked specifications with key stakeholders on the firm’s engineering teams to ensure the tools were fit for purpose, and fully brand standardised. Engineers can now raise one purchase order to get a pre-approved tailored toolkit, leveraging better pricing because of purchasing quantities, and improving compliance. The estimated annual saving in terms of time spent sourcing and purchasing is around 500 hours. Additionally, personal ownership of tools leads to less tool damage and losses.

The RS ‘Maintaining the Flow’ report can be downloaded in full here.