How does your organization overcome the challenge of having important documentation and asset data separated in legacy systems or siloed between different teams?

This is a frequent – and often debilitating – concern. In many cases, for example, asset drawings and relevant paperwork are owned by engineering teams, but technicians often never have direct access to it. Similarly, work order and repair updates initiated by technicians are not readily available to engineering teams, which can cause delays and extra red lines. On the IoT side, improper alarm management from IoT software solutions can result in alarm fatigue and inefficient work order execution.

The Cost of Siloed Systems

These recurring issues can cost an organization both time and money as its employees struggle with the resulting:

  • Extended downtime
  • Incorrect repairs
  • Essential data lost between departments
  • Safety and compliance concerns
  • Lack of efficient preventive/predictive maintenance

In many organizations, these problems have just been accepted as part of the daily environment. However, this is becoming increasingly unacceptable as organizations around the world continue to modernize and digitally transform their operations. In fact, according to Deloitte, companies who focused on digitalization during the pandemic show greater resilience and greater ability to adapt to supply chain challenges. As a result:

  • 62% of surveyed companies aim to focus on robotics and automation over the next 12 months
  • 60% want to improve analytics
  • 39% want to incorporate an IoT platform into their operations.
  • In this context, integrated systems and multi-site, remote operations are crucial.

The Benefits of Integrated Systems

With more cross-team collaboration and improved predictive maintenance capabilities, company operations and processes can be greatly improved, and organizations could see significant benefits, including:

How These Systems Work

 By combining the power of a CMMS, EDMS, and IoT in one single user interface, you can facilitate seamless collaboration within teams and between departments while offering instant access to the most up-to-date plant and facility data. Additionally, provide your organizations with:

  • Enhanced asset management: Help every department in your business to increase productivity, reduce errors, improve collaboration, and centralize crucial engineering and maintenance information
  • Increased process efficiency: Controlled documentation is difficult to manage as it’s unstructured, spread across systems, and difficult to trust due to constant change. What's more, maintenance teams and plant managers often struggle to access the technical manuals, CAD drawings, or project files they need to complete a given task. Our EDMS simplifies document management over the entire asset information lifecycle, allowing users to track parallel changes, streamline concurrent engineering, and maintain compliance while ensuring data quality and integrity. Additionally, with IoT remote monitoring capabilities, the CMMS can automatically receive notifications and trigger work order creation before an asset is about to fail to allow for more proactive decision-making.
  • Digital transformation: Effective digital transformation and implementation of IoT and IIoT technologies is all about having the right functionalities in a truly integrated system. Connecting a CMMS and EDMS makes it easy to share and collaborate in real time on the latest document versions with internal teams and external EPCs using a secure, automated information exchange. Similarly, adding IoT capabilities provides real-time, remote data that helps organizations make informed decisions, reduce costs, and operate more predictively. This ultimately helps truly modernize and optimize both engineering and maintenance operations.
  • Employee safety and satisfaction: Integrating Maintenance Connection, Meridian, and vx Observe helps plant managers implement proper safety protocols so that fewer injuries occur, less money is spent covering damages, and plants experience less downtime.

Final Thoughts

If you’re relying on legacy systems or “making do,” with outdated manual or reactive practices, you are setting your business up for failure – and this is a fact that can no longer be ignored.

With Accruent’s integrated manufacturing solutions, you can transform your operations and make sure that your team never falls behind by ensuring your teams are able to conduct proper maintenance the first time.

Fully optimize your organization’s manufacturing system with Accruent’s purpose-built manufacturing solutions. Find out how.