At a high level, manufacturing maintenance programs are all relatively similar, everyone is looking to reduce downtime.

An Engineering Document Management Solution can help your organization achieve this. A 2017 Aberdeen Group report , "Asset Performance Management: Blazing A Better Path to Operational Excellence", identified annual losses of $50 billion being suffered by the manufacturing industry as a result of unplanned downtime.

With this in mind, manufacturers are instituting critical maintenance goals, including:

  • Extending equipment life through preventive and predictive maintenance.
  • Accelerating service requests and expediting repair.
  • Improving planning and labor productivity.

For companies to improve their maintenance performance, their labor productivity needs 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) such as Accruent’s Maintenance Connection.

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 maintenance, repair and operations (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 instead of an engineering document management system can lead to ineffective document version 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 like Maintenance Connection, which integrates with Meridian to provide document version control functionality, 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 maintenance & engineering asset information.

Maintenance workers need access to the latest versions of drawings and documents to get their jobs done. However, using a paper-based document management system with no access to a mobile CMMS device instead of an engineering document management system, maintenance workers are doubling their workload and potentially losing critical information in the field.

 

There are three main challenges when managing document version control and processes:

 

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 are streamlined to raise efficiency and productivity.

Separate systems.

Whenever maintenance and engineering teams work out of disparate systems—without an 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.

Manufacturing companies must 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 (EDM) 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 maintenance & engineering 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.

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 and complete work orders more quickly and efficiently.

You will 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.

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 engineering information management software to give them fast access to engineering documentation anytime, anywhere. Schedule a demo today.