At a high level, manufacturing maintenance programs are all relatively similar —everyone is looking to reduce downtime.
A 2017 Aberdeen Group report on asset performance management and operational excellence identified annual losses of $50 billion dollars being suffered by the manufacturing industry as a result of unplanned downtime.[1]
With this in mind, manufacturers are instituting critical maintenance goals, including:
- Extending equipment life through preventative and predictive maintenance
- Accelerating service requests and expediting repair
- Improving planning and labour productivity
But for companies to improve their maintenance performance, their labour productivity need to increase as well.
This potential shift is one of the primary drivers for integrating your dynamic asset information with a modern computerized maintenance management system (CMMS).
Simplifying Your Core Asset Information Needs
CMMS solutions allow manufacturers to streamline maintenance processes to reduce downtime and lower maintenance costs. Asset tracking—through both preventive maintenance or replacement—can help manufacturers budget and plan to solve various issues.
Historically, CMMS solutions keep track of documents ranging from work order history to bills of materials. However, numerous other types of documents and drawings are associated with an asset.
The core asset information materials needed when performing MRO activities include:
- Drawings
- Operating and maintenance procedures
- Vendor manuals
- Other information related to P&IDs and process flow diagrams
Relying on paper-based systems to manage these documents can lead to ineffective document control. With thousands of drawings and procedures associated with items like plant form P&IDs and process flow diagrams, it is imperative to have accurate information when and where these materials are needed.
By moving from a paper-based solution to a CMMS, organizations can consolidate their essential asset information and simplify their data processes and workflows.
Learn more about Accruent’s CMMS solution, Maintenance Connection.
Challenges in Maintaining Your Maintenance & Engineering Asset Information
Maintenance workers need access to the latest versions of drawings and documents to get their jobs done, but with a paper-based document management system and no access to a mobile CMMS device, maintenance workers are doubling their workload and potentially losing critical information in the field.
When managing document control and processes, you’re bound to run into these three main challenges:
Change Management
From an engineering perspective, change management is one of the biggest challenges for ensuring effective maintenance. It is important for organizations to know who made a change to a document, when that change was made and why. By creating steps and workflows, organizations can make sure that documents do not advance too soon or waste time and money.
Information Handoffs
Ensuring that engineering teams have effective information handoffs with maintenance departments and external contractors can be difficult. With maintenance teams working out of separate systems, making comments or submitting changes to engineering is often delayed with manual, time-consuming processes and steps. By consolidating systems, information handoffs can be streamlined to raise efficiency and productivity.
Separate Systems
Whenever maintenance and engineering teams work out of disparate systems—without integration between them to create a single source of truth—it can lead to work order delays and negatively impact the safety of personnel in the field.
It is critical for manufacturing companies to tie their assets to engineering documentation to reduce costly downtime and lower the total cost of maintenance. Without consolidated systems, however, the ability to do this is severely hampered.
You can avoid all of these challenges by not only implementing a CMMS, but also utilizing an engineering document management solution to keep your asset data and information documents up-to-date at all times.
Learn more about Accruent’s engineering document management solution, Meridian.
Unify Your Engineering and Maintenance Departments
By combining Accruent’s Maintenance Connection with our document management solution, Meridian, users can maximize the combined strength of the products to ensure faster, more accurate access to their dynamic asset information.
This integration breaks down information silos between different departments and helps equip maintenance teams to have fast access to ever-changing engineering information whenever and wherever they need it.
And by providing a single source of truth for all engineering documentation, teams can eliminate duplicate data entry into different systems. Maintenance Connection users have direct access at a click of a button to the related technical documentation, which they know is up-to-date thanks to Meridian.
Time saved searching for documents can translate to cost savings as teams are more productive, completing work orders more quickly and efficiently.
You’ll also save money by improving the ability to purchase early in the engineering phase, reducing the risk of ordering the wrong spare parts because of inaccurate or outdated documents and increasing production through shorter unplanned process downtime.
Accruent is the only provider of a proprietary integrated CMMS and engineering document management solution purpose-built for the manufacturing industry. Our solutions ensure the accuracy of asset information, close work orders more efficiently and support the safety of maintenance personnel in the field.
Equip your maintenance teams with face access to engineering documentation anytime, anywhere. Schedule a demo today.
[1]Aberdeen Group, Asset Performance Management: Blazing a Better Path to Operational Excellence, November 2017.
