Leading Water Utility Maintenance With a CMMS at United Utilities & Binnies

Chris Bates, Director of Operations and Maintenance Excellence at Binnies, joins the Comparesoft Maintenance Management Podcast to unpack what water utility maintenance management really involves across a large, ageing and heavily regulated asset base. Drawing on eight years at United Utilities, where he went from graduate mechanical engineer to Reliability Maintenance Manager and helped shape the company's predictive maintenance strategy, Chris now leads a consultancy team advising water companies on asset health. In this episode, Chris talks about: What water utility maintenance management looks like, from United Utilities to Binnies Why you nail the requirements before you go anywhere near a CMMS How to select a maintenance system in a regulated, bill-payer-funded environment The two suites of KPIs that show a CMMS implementation is working Setting SMART KPIs for the first time, and letting them evolve with maturity Building the culture, vision and zero-blame environment that makes change stick Winning technicians over to condition monitoring and new maintenance tools Where AI helps in condition monitoring, and where it takes engineers too far from the data Making the case for maintenance to a C-suite that sees it as a cost centre