Maintenance, turnarounds, and ongoing capital modifications of large assets / plants are complex undertakings that involve a collaborative effort of hundreds or even thousands of skilled workers and management. Thousands of individual work activities must be planned, scheduled, and executed in a carefully coordinated manner involving multiple specialised teams, while continuously adhering to rigorous safety and regulatory standards.
To aid in these complex operations, organisations implement various business management systems and processes including Enterprise Asset Management (‘EAM’) systems, Computerised Maintenance Management Systems (‘CMMS’) such as SAP Plant Maintenance (‘PM’), IBM Maximo, IFS Applications, Accruent Maintenance Connection On-site / Online, and Ventyx Asset Suite, just to name a few.
In addition to their EAM / CMMS systems, they may have specialised planning tools to optimise scope development, planning. This can include IAMTech’s iPlan planning & execution tool, as well as Oracle’s Primavera P6, Microsoft Project and other specialised applications for managing work permits, boundaries, safety, blinds, and contractor time tracking.
This collection of systems and associated business processes are collectively referred to as the company’s Enterprise Asset System as defined by ISO 55000 – Asset Management.
These are executed under the guidance of the organisation’s Asset Management Policy, Strategic Asset Management Plan, Asset Framework, and Asset Plans.
It is worthwhile to note that automation applied to an inefficient process will magnify the inefficiency. Likewise, automation applied to an already efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. Therefore, before automating the data pipelines, it is critical to ensure that all the dataflows and workflows are designed efficiently with data content that is cleansed, standardised and designed for improved analytics and decision-making inputs.
The way to get optimal return on investment from systems and software is successful implementation, ensuring the solution is used effectively by staff, and a tailored, robust and standardised process is put into place. This then enables the solution to be easily replicated and rolled out across the entire organisation.
The combination of the correct tools, a successful workflow process & great implementation is the key to unlocking trapped value, work optimisation, improved asset reliability, increased worker efficiency and reduced costs.
