How Info360® Insight Improves Pump Maintenance

If your water utility has been considering a preventive maintenance program for your pump assets, you may want to investigate Autodesk Info360 Insight.

Formerly an Innovze product, Info360 Insight is a cloud-based solution for water operations analytics, incident management and compliance reporting. It unifies water and wastewater utility network data for data-driven water and wastewater decisions. With it, utilities and engineering service providers can:

• Automate reporting for regulators, stakeholders and sustainability initiatives.
• Use data to drive decisions on operations and levels of service.
• Plan scenarios and understand the outcomes of decisions.

In New Zealand, Wellington Water gave Info360 Insight a trial run to see how the software could improve the utility’s pump maintenance and service.

As described in an Autodesk Innovyze customer story, Wellington Water manages drinking water, wastewater and stormwater services for its customers. The utility was already proactive in its pump maintenance to avoid outages that would disrupt service to a total of 418,000 customers.

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Before its pilot project using Info360 Insight, Wellington Water used standard usage metrics to schedule pump maintenance, as well as responding to noises or vibrations that might be signaling a problem. Under that system, the utility was sometimes scheduling refurbishments on pumps before they were actually needed. To be most efficient, Wellington Water determined pump maintenance needed to be based on more extensive data and wanted to optimize its equipment usage.

Using a consultant, the utility developed a preventive maintenance program for its assets. A solution involving Info360 Insight was designed to use the utility’s SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) data. Data collection could even be automated. Info360 Insight could take in and analyze the SCADA information for analytics and modeling, capital planning, asset management, and operational performance.

Instead of using spreadsheets to handle data, as had been done by Wellington Water in the past, the information – including performance metrics from field tests and telemetry – could be shared with water engineers and operations managers on dashboards.

Info360 Insight enabled the development of an asset management plan that:

• forecasts maintenance requirements;
• understands system performance and design;
• confirms assets are operating as expected;
• validates capacity flows, pressures and calibration.

In addition to optimizing its pump maintenance process, the Wellington Water transition resulted in more resilient water operations. The utility has estimated a 20% savings in electricity costs, as well as less money spent on maintenance, since it is now only performed when it is needed.

Labor is also saved because fewer field tests are needed to assess the condition of the pumps. Info360 Insight can detect when pumps are on the verge of failing or have compromised performance issues. Wellington Water can then schedule staff to perform repairs proactively before service to customers is impacted.

Using Info360 Insight resulted in a long-term win for Wellington Water.

If you’re interested in learning more about Innovyze products, contact Graitec Group today and talk to an industry expert.