Metro awards extension to asset management contract

Asset management company Pragma Africa’s asset care centre (ACC) contract for the centralised asset refurbishment and maintenance of the electricity division of the Ekurhuleni metropolitan municipality has been extended to 2010, reports Pragma Africa MD Alain Tait.

Pragma Africa was initially awarded a three-year contract by the metro to provide an asset care centre to assist in the development of an asset management system to support the management of asset refurbishment and maintenance.

The company will now have an extended scope of service for the maintenance and refurbishment of electrical infrastructure for a set period starting October 6, 2008, and ending in June 2010, reports Tait.

Pragma Africa states that more than R200-million has been spent over the last three years on refurbishment projects by the Ekurhuleni municipality, in addition to the normal yearly operational expenditure.

The ACC service provided by Pragma Africa will be extended to include on-site staff at the municipality’s nine customer care centre (CCC) depots and workshops.

“Our ACC resources mix is usually a combination of administrative, technical planning and engineering skills, thereby providing another unique offering to our clients, to provide the skills they may be lacking,” mentions Tait.

Pragma Africa will deploy a total of 13 people at Ekurhuleni, with three people central and ten schedulers at the CCCs.

He says that Pragma Africa’s ACCs are delivered through service level agreements with the company’s clients, in order to ensure the timely delivery of services.

“Our entire service offering is packaged into properly defined and documented business processes, which are deployed to our clients through either our off-site or on-site models,” says Tait.

Assets
The Ekurhuleni municipality’s ACC manages electricity infrastructure assets in On Key, the maintenance management system, totalling about 62 000 maintenance items, with a total replacement value of R12-billion, reports Pragma Africa.

As part of the company’s service to the metro, it will include the management of substations, minisubstations, intrusive maintenance, infrared scanning, oil analysis, trip testing, and overhead line and battery inspections.

Pragma Africa states that between 7000 and 8000 work orders for proactive maintenance and refurbishment are generated every month.

Tait says that these assets are loaded onto an enterprise asset management system, namely On Key Management, together with all the scheduled maintenance tasks required in the scope of service provided to the municipality.

“We are providing the necessary and crucial solution to the pain points being felt in South Africa, such as infrastructure degradation, skills shortages and lack of sustainability,” declares Tait.

He mentions that Pragma Africa has maintained a 25% growth in the current Southern African economic situation and owing to the number of infrastructure projects under way in South Africa.

Project Girth
Tait reports that the company is undertaking a range of projects, which includes a five-year maintenance and management contract with petrochemicals company Shell South Africa.

The Shell South Africa contract, currently in its third year, includes the management of all third-party contracts, such as the security and environmental compliance for all maintenance and project work to be performed at every Shell retail site, reports Pragma Africa.

Tait says that the company is also taking part in a pilot asset management project with government’s Hospital Revitalisation Programme (HRP) at two hospitals in the Western Cape.

The programme currently includes 62 State-owned hospitals and is the vehicle used to raise the condition of the hospitals to enhance the level of service provided to the communities where they are positioned.

Pragma Africa is providing pilot ACCs for the Eben Donges hospital, in Worcester, and George hospital, in George, both of which have been undergoing renovations and significant upgrading, reports Tait.

The company has been tasked with recording all maintenance activity performed at the hospitals, which includes breakdown, defect and preventive maintenance tasks as part of the HRP initiative.

Pragma Africa aims to build on its current successes and is currently pursuing projects in three key industries in which it currently operates, namely petrochemicals, utilities and facilities as well as manufacturing, concludes Tait.