HOW CITY OF WEST KELOWNA DRIVES VALUE WITH EPTURA ASSET
City of West Kelowna Water Treatment Plants increase operational efficiency and productivity by 50%
By implementing Eptura Asset, the City of West Kelowna transformed its water treatment plant maintenance from a work-order driven approach to a comprehensive, asset-focused strategy. With improved visibility into asset histories and lifecycles, the team streamlined workflows, enhanced data accuracy, and organized operational information more effectively, empowering the staff to manage maintenance with greater efficiency and confidence.
Customer profile
City of West Kelowna Water Treatment Plants: Specialists in providing safe, sustainable water to the community
Industry
Utilities
City population:40,000
LocationWest Kelowna, Canada
Situated between Vancouver and Calgary in British Columbia, the City of West Kelowna operates two state-of-the-art facilities dedicated to producing safe, clean drinking water.
At the time of the commissioning in 2007, the Powers Creek Water Treatment Plant was the largest of its kind in Canada. The CA$18.8 million project included the cost of constructing the treatment plant and its intakes and equipment, an eight megaliter reservoir, and UV disinfection. System assets include six reservoir lakes, eleven dams, one intake, four treated water reservoirs, three pump stations, a diversion channel, a chlorination facility, and approximately 130 kilometers of water main.
Opened in May 2024, the CA$45.1 million Rose Valley Water Treatment Plant added capacity to deliver 70 million liters of treated water per day and was designed to increase to 115 million liters a day to meet future demand. The state-of-the-art three-story, 5,100-square-meter facility services 19,600 customers and uses coagulation, flocculation, dissolved air flotation, filtration, UV disinfection, and chlorination. The water system assets include three reservoir lakes, three dams, one diversion pipeline, one intake, three treated water reservoirs, two pump stations, and approximately 165 kilometers of water main.
Together, the systems serve a population of approximately 40,000 people.
The challenge
The need for enhanced asset management
1
Limited asset tracking
Maintenance focused on individual work orders rather than tracking assets by type, age, or history
2
Manual data management
Adding and updating CMMS records was time-consuming and fragmented
3
Lacked maintenance insights
Struggled to monitor asset condition and plan preventive maintenance effectively
In 2018, the West Kelowna team brought their water treatment plant maintenance in-house, hiring skilled tradespeople and implementing a CMMS to manage operations. Initially, the team added data to the work order-based system, focusing on managing maintenance tasks through individual tickets rather than organizing assets by their specific attributes or histories.
By 2022, Water Supply and Treatment Technical Coordinator Sarah Pennington and her team recognized that they needed a more robust system to effectively manage the plant’s assets and maintenance.
The solution
Choosing Eptura Asset
To address these challenges and improve asset visibility, the City of West Kelowna implemented Eptura Asset. The platform enables the team to manage assets based on their specific attributes and histories, providing a detailed view of each asset’s lifecycle and maintenance needs.
Eptura Asset stood out compared to other software for its:
-
- Ease of use
- Quality of features
- Quality of customer support
- Overall functionality
- Value/return on investment
- Mobile app experience
The transition to Eptura Asset provided an opportunity to review workflows and cleanse existing data to maximize the team’s use of the new solution’s expanded capabilities. Identifying which fields were required for the data upload helped the team organize operational information more effectively, such as categorizing parts by asset or inventory number.
Eptura’s team scheduled regular meetings and video walkthroughs to facilitate a smooth system setup, and the West Kelowna team leveraged step-by-step training videos on the Eptura Knowledge Center to learn new workflows for inspections.
Eptura solution
The Eptura team was fantastic and always on hand to help walk through anything we didn’t understand. It was a great learning experience that helped us organize our assets and workflows more efficiently.
"The Results
New features boost maintenance efficiency
Operational efficiency results:
- Boost in maintenance efficiency and productivity
- Streamlined preventive maintenance scheduling
- Faster access to asset details with mobile QR code scanning
Cost savings results:
- Detailed budget tracking through purchase order system
- More accurate forecasting of future maintenance spend
- Reduced time spent on inspections and work order creation
The transition to Eptura Asset delivered transformative results for the City of West Kelowna’s water treatment plant operations, significantly improving efficiency. The team now uses the system for work orders, inventory, purchase orders, and asset management, which they estimate has increased efficiency and productivity within their maintenance operations by 50%. Preventive maintenance scheduling has streamlined inspections, ensuring no tasks are overlooked, while asset categorization has created a clear hierarchy with detailed specifications and locations for each piece of equipment. QR code scanning further simplifies workflows, giving employees immediate access to asset histories and details directly from their mobile devices.
Alongside efficiency gains, the shift to Eptura Asset has also produced measurable cost savings. The purchase order system provides detailed budget tracking and spending analysis, allowing the team to see exactly where resources are allocated and plan more accurately for future needs. Organizing data more effectively and reducing time spent on inspections and work order creation has further improved productivity.