Case Studies

Northampton Borough Municipal Authority - Northampton Water Treatment Plant
Northampton, Pennsylvania

Situation
The Northampton Borough Municipal Authority (NBMA) authorized the construction of a $25 million, fully automated water treatment facility to replace their 60 year old plant. The two-year construction process posed many challenges to the operations staff with the magnitude of training and how they would approach managing the facility requirements for operations and maintenance (O&M) with the same staffing levels they were using for the old facility with capacity increasing exponentially.

To help identify and execute the facility management demands for the new water treatment plant and protect their investment, the management team at NBMA decided to implement a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). The NBMA water treatment facility included a 1500KW generator, process water pumping stations at various sites, and an array of filtration and chemical feed equipment.

Challenges
The management at NBMA committed to optimizing the operational performance of their new facility by expanding the scope of the construction project to include execution of a comprehensive CMMS program enabling them to manage the facility management requirements from the initial startup date and substantial completion.

The specific role of providing consultant services has been to provide training and database development for the equipment and maintenance requirements based on design and as-built drawings, site reviews, and O&M manuals readily available during construction to accelerate the learning curve to assume maintenance operations on the new state of the facility.

The primary challenge was to identify and execute a progressive program to prioritize equipment operations and implement maintenance programs while the plant was under construction and meet the challenges of the operations staff assuming full operations in the transition during startup.

Solution
Gannett Fleming’s facility management team was hired to provide consulting services to enable the operations team to analyze maintenance trends, improve overall performance, and document state environmental requirements while optimizing life cycle costs for the new water treatment facility. The years of equipment experience that the facilities management consultants provided the operations staff at NBMA enabled the team to identify manufacture maintenance intervals and procedures and provide a management tool to schedule, identify, and implement a comprehensive program to ramp up the facilities management infrastructure. The execution of a CMMS program will allow the operation’s staff at NBMA to expand their maintenance requirements over time.