Startex-Jackson-Wellford-Duncan Water District (SJWD) supplies an average of six million gallons per day of high-quality drinking water to more than 50,000 people in the South Carolina Highlands. Last year, SJWD’s Board of Commissioners (the Commission) directed the utility to reduce their overall energy consumption and cost, and to improve pump operations.
With this directive in mind, SJWD assembled a multi-disciplinary team to evaluate various options for optimizing their operations. They chose Motors@Work due to our asset-focused approach, strategic location, and extensive motor catalog.
Implementing Motors@Work’s helped SJWD gain a better understanding of their inventory. In instances where SJWD did not have sufficient knowledge or records of the pumps and motors in their inventory, the Motors@Work implementation team stepped in to catalog the assets in SJWD’s inventory, simplifying the task of collecting and loading asset information into Motors@Work’s solution.
SJWD saw benefits from Motors@Work beginning the day they went live on the software. “We knew we had certain pumps that seemed to operate continuously and we weren’t getting the efficiencies we thought we should,” noted Billy Cothran, SJWD’s chief operating officer, “The information Motors@Work provided confirmed our suspicions.”
As a result of Motors@Work’s analyses, SJWD changed their pumping strategy and moved up several projects in their Capital Investment Plan. “We want to move from a reactive maintenance to a predictive maintenance approach,” Cothran reported, “Motors@Work helped us justify that to the Commission.”
Cothran concluded, “2018 will be a big year of change for us.”
To learn more about SJWD’s journey and how Motors@Work is helping them achieve their goals, read the case study.