Infor has announced that Samra Wastewater Treatment Plant, Jordan’s largest wastewater treatment facility, has transformed the efficiency of its operations, reducing its maintenance budgets and helping preserve Jordan’s scarce water reserves by deploying Infor EAM.
Samra, which serves Amman and the neighbouring city of Zarq, opened in 2006 and now serves some 5 million people. The plant has the capacity to treat 370,000 cubic metres of wastewater daily and is currently running at almost 92% capacity. While the plant will undergo an expansion to increase capacity by 30% starting next year, the directors also recognised the need for continuous improvement to ensure the plant operates at maximum efficiency.
The directors understood that asset management was one of the main areas for potential improvement. Indeed, Samra’s operation relies on hundreds of thousands of assets, from pipes and pumps to site buildings and moveable equipment, worth millions of dollars. The facility also generates 90% of its own energy from water turbines and biogas generators, whose assets are costly and essential to the daily operation of the plant.
To improve the management of these assets, Samra decided to install Infor EAM, with Infor’s partner Intertec Systems deploying the solution. The first phase of the deployment covered more than 4,000 assets.
The deployment enabled Samra to fully automate its asset maintenance, including daily schedules for the maintenance team to inform technicians which assets to proactively check, repair, maintain or replace across Samra’s four locations.
Samra had already achieved a high level of Business Continuity by deploying Infor EAM, which helped it gain its ISO55000 certification and placed it in a strong position when COVID-19 hit. During the height of the pandemic crisis, Samra operated the plant with about 50% of its usual on-site workforce, with additional restrictions on staff movement and equipment entering the site.
Infor EAM was used to generate all work orders and prioritise work and mission-critical orders. It helped the organisation to follow essential stock movements and to prioritise the most important purchases during the crisis and recovery period.
Anas Al-Momani, Asset Division Manager, Samra, said: “By automating our asset maintenance, our 60-strong maintenance team now works proactively, saving hundreds of work hours and ensuring that assets are inspected, maintained and repaired at the right time, before potential problems have a chance to arise. This has helped us reduce our maintenance costs while also helping the overall facility run at a greater level of efficiency, which means the plant is more efficient at treating water.”
Khaled AlShami, Infor director of solution consulting, Middle East and Africa (MEA), said: “Infor EAM has given Samra clear visibility of its assets, enabling it to digitise and automate its maintenance function – and the results in terms of efficiency and cost savings are clear. Asset management is important for all organisations, but the benefits are especially keenly felt by utilities such as Samra.”
Looking ahead, Samra continues to expand its use of Infor EAM, adding more assets to the system and expanding the scope of the solution. The water utility company has stated that all assets deployed as part of the expansion in 2021 to 2024 will also be added to the system.
