Ronak Monga

Dubai, UAE 16 May 2019: Grundfos is placing greater focus on the service sector, which has become a brand new business parallel and revenue stream for the company, said Ronak Monga, Business Development Manager, HVAC, Grundfos. “We don’t look at it as just an aspect of after sales – it is an interest for us,” he said, pointing out that demand for mechanical servicing is only set to grow. “In Dubai, alone, they are retrofitting 30,000 buildings. You can imagine if there are approximately 100,000 buildings in total. There are, on average, 5-6 pumps in each building. You are talking about half a million operating pumps in the emirate of Dubai, and I think there will be more. You can imagine the amount of energy they may be consuming and the amount of service they need to have to keep on operating efficiently.” Monga said there should be greater focus on ensuring high-quality products enter the building and on maintenance to ensure equipment is operating as designed.

To address the growing demand, Monga said, the company is offering contracts to maintain Grundfos and non-Grundfos pumps, leveraging the knowledge, skills and training of its people to enhance the efficiency and to extend the lifecycle of assets. “By doing annual maintenance contracts, you take the headache away from doing it yourself,” he said, adding that a number of clients have opted for this solution. Some FM companies outsource maintenance of pumps to Grundfos, while in other cases, he said, building owners take the initiative to ask Grundfos to maintain the mechanical aspects of the project and leave the rest to the FM provider. “We have both types of contracts, so there is a lot of flexibility,” he said. “We also have different tiers – gold, silver and bronze – depending on the level and frequency of service in the annual maintenance contract. We offer these contracts through authorised service partners.” Monga said Grundfos also conducts studies on how to optimise the pumps, be it through retrofit or through managing the controls, in addition to offering commissioning and installation services.

Monga said Grundfos’ involvement in maintenance is a commitment to promote best practices in the market. “We have a strong service team doing continuous competence development training of facility managers and operators on what they should be looking at and how they can improve it,” he said. Grundfos is also learning from this interaction, Monga said, as the company sends the feedback of facility managers and operators to the Grundfos R&D team in an effort to improve products in a way that will address challenges facing stakeholders. He added that Grundfos invests a minimum of five per cent of its revenue into R&D, and the fruits of this can be seen in the enhanced efficiency of the company’s horizontal split case pumps, designed for large-capacity pumping, adding that the pump range has seen an improved efficiency of 3-5%. “This is big money for anybody involved in District Cooling,” he said, “because every single percentage in efficiency improvement culminates with the number of pumps, the size of pumps that you have to operate 24 hours – it adds up quickly to savings.”

Monga said the company actively engages with clients, consultants and contractors through the Retrofit Academy and through the Commercial Building Services (CBS) Day, held four times a year. “We invite consultants, clients and contractors to discuss application enhancement, efficiency improvement and new technology adoption,” he said. “We are also doing ad hoc events, like Booster Days, which is application-specific.”

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