Powering up UK gas transmission asset reliability in partnership with National Grid

Nikita Anosov, Project Manager & Scrum Master, National Grid, is highly complimentary about the support he received from the Beamex team: “Despite the challenges and the need to adapt to new ways of working, things went very smoothly. Aside from having to do everything remotely, it’s important to remember that this was something of a leap of faith for our organisation in terms of moving to a cloud-based solution for calibration management. The Beamex team were really helpful and supportive from day one of the project.”
Andy Barnwell echoes these sentiments: “It has been a phenomenal journey, and we have maintained an open, honest dialog and a collaborative way of working throughout, which has certainly helped the team on our side demonstrate the true value of the Beamex solution to our management team.”

Achievements at National Grid

Efficiency

Up to 4000 hours saved on calibration per year

With the Beamex CMX

Safety

With MC6-Ex designed to operate in hazardous areas

See the MC6-Ex

Digitization

Standardized processes for recording, storing and analyzing calibration data

Integrated Calibration Solution

Summary

Customer Success Story - National Grid and Beamex

About the National Grid facility

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.

Request a consultation

Download the case story as a PDF

Significant room for improvement

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.

“Without a centralised and standardised solution for gathering, recording, storing, and analysing instrument calibration data it was very challenging for us to build a true picture of how our assets were operating, optimise our ways of working, and build business cases for investment,” says Andy Barnwell, Asset Management Systems Owner, National Grid.

Expectations

“Over the years we have developed an excellent working relationship with National Grid and, based on our knowledge of their assets and operational process for calibration, we were confident we could supply them with a fully automated and integrated calibration solution that would improve both access to and visibility over asset data through a centralised database,” explains John Healy, Director of Sales, UK & Ireland, Beamex.

Enviroment

Just like every other business, both Beamex and National Grid had to navigate the hurdles thrown up by the Covid pandemic, which meant remote scoping meetings and planning workshops instead of face-to-face gatherings. Nikita Anosov, Project Manager & Scrum Master, National Grid, is highly complimentary about the support he received from the Beamex team: “Despite the challenges and the need to adapt to new ways of working, things went very smoothly. The Beamex team were really helpful and supportive from day one of the project.”

Commitment

Matthew Sanders, Calibration Solution Specialist at Beamex, states: “The collaboration was brilliant from both sides. We had detailed discussions with the systems team and end users to make sure all the risks were considered, which is critical in a project of this size. The adaptations we made to the solution rollout have led to increased benefits across the board at National Grid. Our aim from day one was to deliver the best possible solution, and the whole Beamex project team is very proud of the result.”

Centralising the data

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.

Beamex CMX calibration software analytics dashboard

Results

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.

Future

National Grid plan to further expand their use of the CMX system to include the execution of maintenance inspection tasks using the Beamex bMobile application running on iOS tablets. bMobile is an application for smartphones and tablets that allows field calibrations to be executed offline with step-by-step guidance.