Ekurhuleni has entrusted the management of their R24 billion’s worth maintenance significant assets to Pragma for a further three years. Over the past 5 years, Pragma has built an excellent Asset Management base on which Ekurhuleni Electricity has gained control of their assets.

The Assets
The Electricity Infrastructure Assets are the High Voltage (HV) and Medium Voltage (MV) distribution assets, totaling approximately 62 000 maintenance significant items, with a total replacement value of R24 billion. Catered for as part of the service are substations, mini-substations, kiosk inspections, intrusive maintenance, Infra-red scanning, oil analysis, trip testing, overhead line and battery inspections. These assets have been loaded into the On Key EAM system along with all the scheduled maintenance tasks. Between 7000 – 8000 Work Orders for pro-active maintenance and refurbishment are generated per month.

Refurbishment Program
The refurbishment program is also managed by the ACC, with the intent to keep the infrastructure assets & systems reliable and to improve the current condition. More than R400 million has been spent over the last 4 ½ years on refurbishment projects in addition to the normal annual operational expenditure. In the 2010/11 financial year the refurbishment budget is over R220M and a mark able reduction in outages and faults is being experienced.

Lead by example
The Asset Care Centre at Ekurhuleni regularly host visitors from neighboring African Nations as well as Metro’s and Municipalities within South Africa all looking at how, they too, can address the actions required to address the global Electricity crisis.

The team There are 14 Pragma staff members at the Metro and they perform asset management guidance in accordance to a well developed set of business processes. Ekurhuleni sees the Asset Care Centre as a partnership opportunity and understand that they would ideally like to take the function into their own organisation in the future when resourcing and skills availability is better. Of the 14 staff members on the contract 9 are placed in the CCCs (depots) and schedule maintenance activity on a daily basis.