This case study highlights the critical need for robust generator monitoring in South Africa, where persistent loadshedding seriously impacts business operations. Seeing businesses struggle to ensure an uninterrupted power supply and manage the additional burden of managing generators, Pragma developed an asset health management service focused on generators. This intervention ensures uninterrupted power supply and offers enhanced governance, proactive maintenance and cost-saving benefits. On Key was implemented as the backbone of the service, enabling the team to collect reliable information from a wide base of generators, irrespective of brand or location.
“In the face of economic challenges and ongoing load shedding in South Africa, robust generator monitoring is essential to sustain assets, cut costs and ensure uninterrupted business operations.”
– Rhynard Prins, Business Development Manager –
Key challenges
- Manual scheduling of services and re-fuelling events.
- Data accessibility.
- Equipment compatibility.
- Lack of benchmarking and trending.
- No early warning system before a power outage occurs.
- No historical data for governance and invoice verification.
- Additional manpower is required to check generator health daily.
- A delay between a generator alarm being raised and action taken.
Our intervention
- Data is continuously collected from generator controllers and stored centrally on an integrated enterprise asset management system.
- Alarms are centrally triggered and prioritised.
- Access to data leading up to alarms being triggered.
- Centralised ability to add, remove or adjust alarm triggers without the need to visit each generator to apply changes.
- The On Key Asset Pulse app enables seamless realtime monitoring, analytics and reporting. It gives the facilities manager the perfect tool to manage their generator fleet.
Value add
- The generator is monitored in realtime and all historical data is recorded for analysis purposes.
- A new level of governance is in place where actual generator monitoring data can be compared to invoices for fuel and services.
- Proactive triggers are in place to manage services and re-fuelling.
- Maintenance strategies can be applied to asset type level.
Client background
- Pragma is an engineering company that delivers enterprise asset management solutions to asset-intensive industries. Pragma takes pride in the software tools and management practices they have developed to help companies in the mining, manufacturing, local government, distributed facilities and original equipment manufacturing sectors perform at their peak while balancing asset performance, cost and risk.
- Our client’s head office has a 200kVA backup generator to ensure no loss of power in the event of a power failure. The facilities manager on site had the task of manually keeping track of generator running hours to schedule services and fuel levels to plan re-fuelling and visually check the generator’s health frequently.