Background
11.3 million gallons of water, 4,300 tons of cooling power, three blowers and 218 pumps with a capacity somewhere in the range of four thousand horsepower: This is what the Maintenance and Operations team at the Georgia Aquarium is working with.
The Georgia Aquarium is the third largest in the world and is spread across 13 acres. An added challenge in maintaining an aquarium is that certain parts and equipment need to be operational 24/7 to support the tank inhabitants.
An intuitive system
When Kendell Thomas was hired as the Assistant Plant Engineer Manager, he immediately needed to start learning how to use their CMMS from Brightly, which was later acquired by Siemens. Kendell says, “I was used to a different system but with the way [the CMMS] is set up, I was able to find my way around it pretty quickly.”
Each day, Kendell comes in and the first thing he does is open up the system to check his numbers. He looks at how many work orders they have, how many are assigned and how many have been completed this month. He likes to start the day with this snapshot of where the department is because it helps him and his team prioritize their work so they can complete requests in a reasonable amount of time.
The importance of documentation
The Aquarium has nine technicians and three managers divided across two shifts, and Kendell is trying to justify adding a third shift. He explains, “It’s important for us to track all of our work and that’s why we want everyone inputting their requests into the system. If all of our work is tracked in the system, then I can run a report and show that we are swamped with work orders and we only have so many man-hours so there is no way we can ever catch up without more help.”
Documentation of their work is extremely important to the Operations and Maintenance team. They get inspected by four different agencies and have to provide records if any problem is found. Tim Smith, Assistant Manager of Plant Engineering, explains, “We have a lot of standards to comply with and if we end up being inspected and a problem is found, we need to be able to quickly show that we already have a work order on that and it is being addressed.”