Black & Veatch has launched a Smart Maintenance business to support utility clients in the UK. The new offering builds upon the company’s technology-led asset management consulting experience - and its programme management, logistics and delivery expertise - to create digitally enabled onsite maintenance teams.
“Our Smart Maintenance business delivers a major evolution in the approach to delivering maintenance services. The big development is that our asset management support is typically delivered at the strategic level; smart maintenance is about helping clients implement those strategies on the ground,” said Mark Malcolm, Black & Veatch Europe’s Director for the new business. “We have designed and constructed many of our client’s assets, and developed strategies to manage them, so we are uniquely placed to help clients maintain them in the most efficient, effective manner.”
Smart Maintenance fits within the concept often referred to as the “fourth industrial revolution” and the shift to cyber-physical systems. For Black & Veatch, Smart Maintenance entails combining established technology-driven maintenance methodologies and smarter instrumentation, control and automation technology. This will be enabled by Black & Veatch’s own data analytics capabilities and visualisation dashboards; and the capabilities of its new artificial intelligence and machine learning strategic partner EMAGIN.
Black & Veatch’s new smart maintenance teams’ support is grounded in:
- Diagnostic analytics – condition, performance and uptime monitoring of the health of assets.
- Dynamic Preventative Maintenance - preventing failures before they occur by using intelligent predictions and dynamic maintenance planning.
- Prognostic Maintenance interventions - using machine learning, pattern recognition and advanced analytics to optimise, manage and deliver interventions.
The development of Smart Maintenance is a further extension of Black & Veatch’s UK utility offering into the infrastructure and capital maintenance sphere. By focussing initially on water but with a view to broadening to other sectors, the offering also supports a drive for greater diversification.