Client: Dunedin City Council (DCC)

Duration: 2021-2024 + two 2-year renewal opportunities

Background 

The Dunedin City Council (DCC) Three Waters systems include 21,000 hectares of water catchment, six treatment plants, 35 pumping stations, 1,450 km of pipe, and all of the electrical systems and SCADA supporting its continuous Dunedin operation.

Beginning on 16th December 2021, so that we could provide on-call services over the Christmas break, Downer’s Automation team began maintenance works for the Dunedin City Council’s Three Waters Electrical & SCADA systems. Our work includes reactive and planned maintenance, callouts, and capital works, often requiring multi-disciplined trades including electrical, instrumentation, control, automation, radio, telemetry, SCADA, PLC, IoT, software development, CAD drafting, and thermography.

Most of the work leans towards reactive maintenance due to the age and condition of the existing Three Waters assets; however, the DCC has significant capital expenditure planned to upgrade these assets and remove any old assets that have reached their end of life.

Delivery Solution

One unique strength of our maintenance offering is that almost all of the services are delivered by our in-house personnel. Our team in Dunedin encompasses a broad spectrum of specialised skills that enables us to deliver the wide  range of services required for this contract. In addition to having a strong water team, Dunedin is the main base for our automation team, and telemetry and radio engineers.

Our automation team is regularly at the forefront of innovation within Downer and has been able to apply their skills directly to the DCC Three Waters Electrical & SCADA Maintenance contract. For example, using PowerApps and PowerBi, we designed and built a CRM system that allows DCC operators in the field to lodge jobs  directly with Downer and view them in real-time, check status, view claims, upload documents, and view libraries. The system doubles as a claiming system for end-of-month activities. It can also produce HSE metrics and graphical job statistics, which can then be easily used to derive monthly reports. This system was developed with full transparency and all invoices – subcontractor, supplier, materials – can be added to a job.

To provide continuity for DCC at the start of the contract, we partnered with the incumbent InfoSCADA for the SCADA delivery. We ensure DCC has a ‘one contract’ experience, by wrapping our systems and processes around InfoSCADA so that delivery is seamless. We are now in the process of expanding our in-house SCADA capability and are completing the lime dosing system with our own SCADA specialists.

Outcome

Using our new CRM system, we removed a bottleneck in the process as previously the DCC supervisor would have to log every job. Now, we can more efficiently receive and respond to any job requests. The success of the tool, and the transparency that we have shown to DCC, has helped to forge a solid relationship between Downer and DCC.

As of July 2022, we have responded to more than 380 service requests since the beginning of the contract. Despite often working at heights or near infectious substances (wastewater), the team has kept Zero Harm at the focus of their work, completing all service requests without any incidents, near misses, or LTIs.