Enhance asset resilience by leveraging intelligent automation
At a glance
GHD Digital helped Energy Development Corporation (EDC) optimise their technologies to streamline the processes for documenting outages and safety-related incidents across their major power plants. Using intelligent automation tools, we designed a roadmap that enhanced data visibility and consolidation as well as improved operational efficiencies, productivity and safety tracking. Together, these upgrades contributed to futureproofing their critical assets.
The challenge
EDC is the largest producer of renewable energy in the Philippines and the second largest producer of geothermal energy in the world. Their power plants account for 20 percent of the country’s total installed renewable energy capacity.
The power utility faced several challenges with their current processes for documenting plant outages and other safety-related incidents as they had multiple legacy systems and tools, such as Google Sheets for data collection, TapRoot for investigation and root cause analysis, IBM Maximo for asset management, and Gmail for communication. These led to data silos and delays in action and decision-making for EDC across their geographically dispersed power plants.
Our response
GHD Digital’s intelligent automation team was engaged to assess EDC’s current systems and recommend pathways to eliminate gaps as well as enhance asset reliability and resilience.
When an incident occurred, the facilities required isolated and time-intensive investigation to identify and assess the cause of the problem and determine the necessary corrective actions. Initially, this was an elaborate process that adversely affected efficiency and productivity. Manual data entry via separate platforms increased the risk of errors in report generation and delays in data collection and synchronisation. The decentralised nature of the facilities also entailed multiple layers of approval, which contributed to cumbersome procedures.
To address these challenges, we developed a comprehensive roadmap that leveraged IBM Maximo and the adoption of Blueprism, a robotic process automation (RPA) platform, to help automate data entry and enable data sychronisation across multiple systems. Through a series of process mapping workshops, empowered by SAP Signavio, we accelerated the future-state documentation of the root cause analysis (RCA) and corrective action (CA) processes that involved consolidating and integrating multiple EDC legacy systems.
In addition, our team’s robust knowledge and experience with these software, enabled them to swiftly develop a customised framework detailing the key benefits and optimal outcomes of combining the capability of IBM Maximo and TapRoot with RPA.
The impact
EDC now has a blueprint that guides them towards implementing intelligent automation across four power plants nationwide. This comprehensive roadmap details the needed key capabilities and expected process improvements once their legacy systems are integrated into IBM Maximo.
By optimising IBM Maximo, TapRoot, and Blueprism, EDC will be better equipped to eliminate data silos, inconsistencies and errors. These technologies will also improve predictive maintenance, allowing them to prioritise maintenance work and prevent extended asset downtime. This is expected to help EDC realise opportunities for cost savings and increased return on investments.
Automation technologies will achieve greater business continuity and more streamlined processes for incident reporting, investigation and action tracking, ensuring asset reliability and constant electricity supply to consumers. Since this solution will create a centralised repository of incidents, EDC will have better visibility of information, which will improve decision-making and foster a proactive stance to better safety outcomes.
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