Summary
National Grid owns the high-voltage electricity transmission network in England and Wales and owns and operates Great Britain’s gas national transmission system (NTS). The company, which employs around 23,000 people, is responsible for transporting these vital sources of energy safely and efficiently from where they are produced to where they are needed, balancing supply and demand on a day-to-day basis from its network of control rooms across the country.
Challenges
National Grid was facing challenges on a number of fronts, with islands of data siloed across disparate systems making it difficult to monitor and accurately assess asset performance. What’s more, there was no established, standardised process for recording and storing calibration data, with technicians at individual sites often improvising their own solutions and relying on time-consuming, paper-based methods.
Solution
Centralising all their asset data in a single system will provide National Grid with the ability to thoroughly interrogate their assets and make informed decisions about maintenance procedures and schedules. “With more and better-quality asset data at our fingertips we have been able to look at saving time and costs by, for example, extending the time between inspections,” highlights Andy Barnwell.
Read the full National Grid customer case story
Result
In terms of concrete savings, the numbers speak for themselves, as James Jepson points out: “With the Beamex solution in place, thanks to automation we have been able to cut the number of steps needed to perform a calibration, saving 15 minutes per device. While this might not sound like much on its own, it adds up to a time saving of over 4,000 hours per year – and a financial saving that runs into millions of pounds, which is astonishing,” James Jepson says.
