Basin Electric Leland Olds Station Reduces Asset Failures

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Basin Electric Power Cooperative (Basin Electric), is one of the largest electric generation and transmission cooperatives in the United States. Basin Electric is consumer owned by 137 member cooperative system, with members’ service territories comprising 540,000 square miles in nine states. Overall, the company serves 2.8 million electric customers.

At its Leland Olds Station location, managers felt the existing maintenance system wasn’t able to keep up with regulatory requirements and the company’s vision for implementing a world-class maintenance strategy.

Some of the issues with the existing maintenance program were:

• Multiple databases that each stored data for different groups of instruments
• Frequent duplicate entries
• Calibration management were centered in the computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), which left users searching for additional information
• When work orders were received, technicians had no easy way to store “As Found” and “As Left” information
• Recorded calibration had to be documented manually

So, in order to address these problems, Basin Electric decided to implement a new calibration management system.

Basin Electric chose Asset Performance Management (APM) from GE Digital (formerly Meridium Enterprise APM) as its calibration management system and utilized it to create a single instrument database.

Once the new database was implemented, Basin Electric cleaned up the data in its existing databases and exported it all into the APM solution. The company also simplified the user interface and created datasheets to shorten the process of adding or correcting data to capture the specific information needed to monitor each type of device.

With APM, Leland Olds Station technicians gained the ability to:

• Review complete certification history at a glance for any device
• View all certification documents via a link
• Have a universal point-of-access for all involved to locate and update instrument calibration information

As a result of implementing an APM solution, technicians at Basin Electric’s Leland Olds Station were able to quickly access a list of calibrations due and easily identify what has been completed, and the route that a specific instrument is assigned to—which resulted in more than $20,000 in savings annually.

GE Digital’s APM solution has also allowed technicians to detect potential problems early on and significantly cut the number of asset failures by 10%. Lastly, this solution improved productivity by helping to minimize the amount of training and reduce the actual time to complete a calibration.