Work order/computerized maintenance management system: An effective, modern solution for Port St. Lucie

Brad Macek, assistant utilities director for the Port St. Lucie Utilities I >cpurlmcnt, recognized it was time to streamline a dated, paper-based work order system when their current system, built in the early 1990s, was showing its age. Macek and his colleagues began researching computerized maintenance management system (CMMSl options that might help them run their utility more efficiently.

"The old system wasn`t able to support the amount of assets we cur rently have," said Macek. "We kept expanding on it as we grew and eventually those expansions simply got too big for the system to handle."

There were a lot of limitations to the old svstcm. uOur maintenance crews had paper and clipboards, so a lot of time at the end of the day was spent either inputting data or turning it over to a switchboard group to do it," said Macek.

Port St. Lucie employs just over 200 workers. The water treatment plants have capacities of 8 mil gal per day (mgd), 11.15 mgd, and 22.5 mgd, while the wastewater treatment plants operate at 6 and 12 mgd. It was a lot to manage with an out-of-date maintenance system that simply wasn`t efficient.

Initially, Macek and his colleagues could not find a system that met their needs/`We looked at a number of different systems and even looked internally to see if we could reproduce something on our own," he said. "But we couldn`t come up with a canned solution that worked for us, so we talked to our neighboring system, Indian River County Utilities, about what they were using."