By Erick Quiroz, Accruent Sr. Sales Executive

Within manufacturing, oil & gas, utilities, metals & mining, education and transportation, companies are working hard to keep capital projects on track (albeit delayed) and continue providing critical services to their customers. They are being challenged to come up with creative strategies, not only to minimize potential COVID-19 exposure, but also to perform critical tasks in the evolving global climate.

Due to the need to keep employees safe and healthy, and reduced availability of personnel due to layoffs and furloughs, there has been a seismic shift in& operations as companies adjust to remote work.

These concerns include:

  1. How do I collaborate with both internal and external stakeholders on projects now that we are not in the office?
  2. How do we ensure that information received from external stakeholders is accurate?
  3. What controls or workflows do we have in place for transmittal and submittal of our projects?

Companies that were able to move to remote work swiftly have minimized the negative impact to their customers, workers and suppliers, while others were caught flat-footed in modernizing their workforce collaboration and are now racing to create a remote working culture that will provide a compelling remote work environment.

For employers who have never managed a remote team or embraced remote work, these are valid questions.Successfully navigating the transition to remote collaboration requires dedicated leadership and a strong sense of trust in team dynamics as well as employees’ individual capabilities.But if remote teams do not have access to the right cloud-based tools, no amount of trust will help them accomplish their tasks.

This raises the question: What are the right tools for remote collaboration in capital project management?

When looking at options for tools to facilitate remote work, here are some additional questions to consider.

How do you:

  • Secure, capture and digitize tasks to maintain your project flow?
  • Handle and track progress and meet regulatory, safety and regulatory compliance?
  • Maintain timely access to technical assets, information and documentation?
  • Lower the learning curve on new software and ramp up remote work productivity?

Using a SaaS solution to grant remote access to the latest documentation.

Now more than ever, our customers need to keep their stakeholders informed, aligned, compliant and in control throughout the plant and asset lifecycle. This can be easily achieved using a SaaS or Cloud-based engineering document management (EDM) solution.

Digital document management systems are perfectly suited for enabling remote work and access.

These solutions can:

  • Allow employees and contractors to access a web-based application so they can work from anywhere.
  • Provide mobile access to documentation to foster better communication between staff, which increases both efficiency and productivity.
  • Allow users to simultaneously update engineering documents and drawings.

By ensuring mobile access to up-to-date documentation anytime, anywhere, companies are able to stay productive and keep capital projects moving forward as planned. If your company has not yet invested in a purpose-built EDM solution, this is the time to start looking.

Accruent’s Meridian Cloud connects Engineering and Maintenance departments and high-level stakeholders to ensure all documents and asset data are compliant in a standardized manner and updated in real time.

Learn more about Meridian Cloud.