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There are three best practices that will allow equipment drawings, manuals, and pictures to enable high quality planning and scheduling. Focus on keeping the documents accurate, accessible, and applied.
Clear labeling of equipment numbers in the field is a quick way to improve many aspects of your work management processes. Some benefits of field labeling equipment include: better work identification, less risk of lockout/tagout mistakes, faster troubleshooting of process upsets, and more efficient preventative maintenance routes.
Equipment hierarchy is the foundation on which the technical database is built. Since the technical database is a key element in allowing efficient planning and scheduling, the equipment hierarchy is a building block of the entire work management system. Nearly every business unit from accounting to purchasing and from operations to maintenance will benefit from a well-organized and complete equipment hierarchy.
We think that providing a mobile solution to our field staff will help them in some way. Whether it be for them to become more efficient or to communicate better, we have the idea that adding a tablet to their toolbox is a good thing. It certainly can be, but how does this new tool fit into their daily pattern of work?
The technical database plays a critical role as an enabler to the planning and scheduling process. The results of a poor technical database are often hidden but can be substantial. To function well, all eight components of the technical database need to be accurate, accessible, and applied during the planning and scheduling process. Benefits of complete bills of material, well labeled equipment in the field, and easy access to original equipment manufacturer procedures will lead to high quality standard job plans that are produced quickly and reliably.
Maintaining an interactive collaborative partnership with inter- and intra-departmental groups and outside groups is essential if a maintenance department is to be successful in delivering asset reliability and availability at a level suitable to achieve production throughput and quality targets. To achieve this, a maintenance department must understand the difference between “what it manages” and “what it controls.”
As we move towards empowering maintenance with AI and other learning tools, connecting to the growing sources of data is an important consideration. Add this to the plethora of MES systems that are available to us, there is much to explore.
Because of the telemetry available from modern equipment, the amount of well-organized data we have available to us is orders of magnitude beyond what we had just a few years back. It is very common now to have access to literally 1000’s of devices, each sending out data payloads with many data elements, at sub-second intervals. There can easily be terabytes of data available for us to analyze and then make decisions with. With so much data available, how best to ingest and use it for making near-real time decisions?
If you search the Internet for information on asset management, the Internet and Industrial Internet of Things, digitalization, business trends and business reengineering, you’ll find a considerable increase in the number of articles with headlines heralding or promising significant and “disruption” or “disruptive” change. It’s wiser to focus on how to extract value from what you have and spend time creating the vision of where you want to go on the digital journey.
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Torbjorn Idhammar is the blog manager for MaintenanceWorld.com.
A maintenance and reliability management consultant, Torbjorn has spent 25+ years in the profession and provides advice to clients around the world.
Elizabeth Ruiz is the site administrator for MaintenanceWorld.com.
She is responsible for reviewing submitted content for the site and ensuring that it provides value to the readers of the site.
Natalie Johnson is the site administrator for MaintenanceWorld.com.
She is responsible for reviewing submitted content for the site and ensuring that it provides value to the readers of the site.
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