This paper discusses how the City of Toronto (Ontario, Canada) Works and Emergency Services Division-Water Pollution
Control (WPC) and Water Supply (WS) became a competitive organization and improved productivity. In 1995 they embarked
on a joint enterprise transformation project. With help from EMA, Inc. as the prime consultant to
partner with the City on this major project, the WPC and WS divisions joined forces and initiated
a competitiveness assessment and alignment of expectations. This assessment reviewed all
organizational design, work practices, and technologies and identified an opportunity to reduce
operations and maintenance expenditures by $36 million a year.
The City determined that the best way to accomplish this was to implement a Computerized
Maintenance Management System (CMMS). With an approximate investment cost of $3 million
to select and implement the system, the City would realize approximately $6.5 million a year from
improved productivity as a result of enabling business practices.
This opportunity was reviewed, validated, and detailed by the Division, and used to establish a
five-year improvement program. Given the name "Works Best Practices Program" (WBPP), the
program included targets for both WPC and WS. The WBPP project was kicked off in 1995 with
a program budget of $105 million with projected savings of $36 million a year. Actual savings
from the program was approximately $16 million per year at the end of 2001.
As a result of the CMMS implementation, all of the City's water and wastewater facilities have
been using the CMMS to support and enable a culture of program driven work and continuous
improvement. As the use of the CMMS becomes an integral part of doing work and the
information captured in terms of cost and work history grows, the City is poised to achieve
improvements in productivity and cost effectiveness that can be in the order of 40 percent of
O&M costs.
Less tangible benefits are the reduced reliance on individual people for the knowledge stored in
their heads, well documented processes and work done on assets to support regulatory
requirements, improved customer satisfaction, improved safety and worker satisfaction.
This paper provides further details of the challenges and successes that the City of
Toronto faced and achieved. Includes figures.
| Edition : | Vol. - No. |
| File Size : | 1
file
, 290 KB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus |
| Number of Pages : | 9 |
