printer friendly version

Breathing new life into old plant equipment

Ospedale Bufalini di Cesena in Emilia Romagna, Northern Italy, demands trouble-free building services and energy efficiency as a part of its ongoing cost reduction programme.

Reliant upon existing plant equipment, Estate Management has sought new ways of working in order to drive performance gain and so free up resources for the real job in hand - patient care.

The customer

Ospedale Bufalini in Cesena, is the regional hospital for Romagna and Northern Italy's leading burns unit. It has 600 beds and conducts some 2000 operations annually. It also supports a busy outpatients department.

The issue

All patients and staff want first class healthcare. Trouble-free 24/7 building services, including heating, ventilation and airconditioning, are an essential part of this mix.

This falls to Estate Management. As well as fixing a myriad of day-to-day issues, the team is under pressure to drive down energy consumption and costs and so free up as many financial resources as possible for the real job in hand - patient care.

With no money for investment in new equipment, Estate Management has no choice but to work with what it has got.

It has turned to Honeywell in order to get more out of its existing plant - energy efficiency and 100% availability through a focus on preventative maintenance.

The solution

Honeywell Italy is providing a HVAC and mechanical maintenance service. This includes round-the-clock remote monitoring of essential plant room equipment such as boilers, chillers, pressure valves and temperature control - factors that impact environmental conditions within the hospital.

Performance data is collected 24/7 and fed over a dedicated ISDN high-speed telephone line to the Honeywell monitoring centre in Padova.

The outcome

On the one hand, Honeywell is helping the customer maintain a comfortable environment for patients and staff. On the other, it is minimising energy consumption and driving down maintenance costs. It is using its comprehensive knowledge of asset management and energy management to increase plant performance and optimise energy savings without detracting from patient comfort.

Round-the-clock monitoring by Honeywell engineers ensures 100% plant uptime. It provides an uninterrupted focus on preventative maintenance directed towards minimising problems and running costs. In the event of trouble, Honeywell engineers are immediately alerted. They, in turn, can respond with an instruction for immediate fix to the hospital's resident engineers - long before the problem starts to escalate and disrupt business-as-usual.

Honeywell's presence also empowers the hospital's resident engineers. They are freed-up to work to a schedule of planned activity, confident in the knowledge that the remote monitoring service will pick up any problems for their timely resolve.

Talking about the value of Honeywell, engineer Pieri says, "Honeywell took the time to understand our requirements and it proposed solutions to our technical problems at the bid stage."

"Despite the constraints of existing, old equipment, we can now confidently deliver on our two main requirements: maximum plant uptime and how to best balance energy output with demand."

The Honeywell solution provides Ospedale Bufalini's Estate Management with the information they need to make better decisions - and to make them more quickly. This ability to respond quickly to changing conditions lifts internal facility management productivity to a new, higher level.

Key benefits:

* Better environment for patients and staff.

* Cost reduction.

* Energy efficiency.

* Improved asset management.

* Preventative maintenance.

* Remote monitoring for 100% up time.

Share this article:

Further reading: