Do you know how much time your service & maintenance staff spends on searching for information?

Service & Maintenance

The efficiency of your service and maintenance organization has a direct impact on your plant’s reliability and availability. Various studies show that in a product-oriented organization, up to 10–35% of the service and maintenance staff’s time is wasted on first searching for and then validating information.

The good news is that the situation can be fixed with effective asset information management, including fast and easy access to required technical information. Let’s have a closer look at how access to accurate information can be improved.

1. Make information easier to find

In many cases, operations and plant maintenance staff have limited visibility into the plant equipment’s current state due to poor documentation practices, such as not following predefined conventions for naming and storing documents. This not only impacts staff productivity and efficiency but also creates a compliance risk as well as a risk of extended downtime if repairs are hindered by poor documentation. Compliance risk refers to potential losses and legal penalties due to failure to comply with laws or regulations regarding, for example, electric appliances, pressure equipment, piping, and constructions blueprints.

2. Define clear rules for change management

Obsolete information can lead your staff astray and cause great damage. It’s therefore important to make sure that everyone knows the rules and is aware of the importance of updating all relevant documents to reflect any changes made to the related assets. In some cases it may not be enough to update existing documents but new documents must be created instead. Maintaining technical hierarchy and bill of materials (BOM) in a plant maintenance system is also required.

The Plant Manager in 2020s

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The Plant Manager in 2020s

3. Improve the accuracy of your as-built and legacy data

Accuracy problems related to asset information are often connected to as-built documentation created during the installation and commissioning phases, or inaccuracies in legacy data that is not maintained. This may lead to the need to double-check and verify the information before using it for maintenance planning or new investments. Sometimes your staff may need to revisit the asset several times to verify the information, which wastes both time and money.

4. Create a detailed maintenance strategy

Maintenance strategy refers to identifying the wearable parts, critical components, spare parts, documents, and maintenance instructions and schedules of your plant’s equipment in order to create a plan for predictive maintenance and improve the reliability and availability of your equipment. Effective maintenance planning requires that you have proper asset information management practices in place.