Equipped to achieve savings

Lisa Bower, head of procurement and facilities at Drax, says: "The lack of clear information on stock levels and utilisation made it challenging to calculate the optimal quantity of each component to carry. Our critical stock is worth more than £35m, so optimisation in this area could be very valuable to the business.”

To help achieve its objectives, Drax engaged IBM business partner BPD Zenith to deploy IBM Maximo Asset Management solutions.

"We selected IBM Maximo software because it combines the advanced asset management capabilities we were looking for with built-in best- practices, helping to ensure compliance with stringent health and safety regulations,” says Richard Barber.

Lisa Bower adds: "When it came to selecting an implementation partner, BPD Zenith was an excellent fit for Drax. The BPD Zenith team’s business culture, technical expertise and deep understanding of our industry made it clear that they had performed complex work of this kind before. Their guidance throughout the implementation proved invaluable.”

In the first stage of the project, Drax replaced multiple legacy stock management and procurement systems with IBM Maximo Supply Chain Management, and migrated 18 months of historical data on active suppliers and purchase orders into the solution.

Lisa Bower comments: "We completed the first phase of the IBM Maximo project within just nine months – an extremely tight deadline for a project of this scale and scope.”

Next, the company implemented the Maximo Work Management System, Scheduler and Health, Safety and Environment Manager modules, enabling a graphical view of human resources and open work orders, in addition to automated work planning capabilities. By using the IBM Maximo Risk Assessment module to assign the correct safety processes according to the status of every work order, Drax ensures compliance with workplace safety requirements.

Richard Barber says: "Today, IBM Maximo is fully integrated into our business processes. Practically everyone in the business now interacts with the Maximo solution to some degree – from our finance and procurement departments to our operations managers and engineering teams.”

Targeting savings

Drax is now using its IBM solutions to identify and drive efficiencies, and is on target to realise its business goals.

"With Maximo at the heart of our supply chain, we have replaced an almost ad hoc approach to procurement with an unprecedented degree of central control,” says Lisa Bower. "By implementing a strict maximum spend per employee, the solution enables a level of transparency in the procurement process that was simply not possible before.

"We are now collecting accurate data on our stock – including the number of times a given type of component is used within a year.
After we have around 12 months of historical data, we plan to utilise forecasting capabilities in Maximo to calculate the optimal stock levels for each high-value component. We predict that reducing our stock down to more optimal levels will enable us to drive cost savings of up to £5 million within three years, which could be redirected elsewhere in the business.”

Efficiency boost

Lisa Bower says: "We have been striving for an asset management interface that delivers the information we need at a glance – and IBM Maximo offers us exactly that. Today, we can automatically integrate information on stock levels, repair priorities and dependences to determine the best times to schedule essential work. As a next step, we will use the single source of accurate data offered by Maximo to generate reports that show exactly how long each type of maintenance task takes to complete.

"In the long term, reporting in Maximo will enable us to refine the accuracy of our maintenance schedules, and help our engineering teams to perform their roles with even greater efficiency. We anticipate that this will be a significant benefit to the business.”