It’s estimated that the average company faces 800 hours of downtime each year. With an hour of downtime costing as much as $540,000, inefficiencies and delays in maintenance activities can be very damaging. Having the correct information there when needed is essential to help mitigate these risks.
Asset optimization is a vital part of business in many industries. Accurate and up-to-date technical documentation that’s quickly and easily accessible underpins safe and efficient operations, maintenance, repair and change of plant and facilities. This remains a challenge for many organizations. So, what can you do to improve document management in your engineering operations?
Poor document management hampers maintenance
For most organizations, documentation on their assets has built up over years. The information for any specific asset is distributed between SAP Plant Maintenance (PM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems, GIS, file servers, mail services, legacy systems and paper archives.
Worse still, different departments and disciplines have maintained their own information store. With so much information held in various silos throughout the organization, maintenance staff are faced with documentation that is incomplete, inaccurate or out of date.
Poor documentation builds inefficiency, cost and risk into the maintenance process. Overcoming this means taking control of your engineering information. There are two key elements:
Centralized information control
The first step is to integrate and consolidate all of the information silos into one central, content repository. That system can enforce data integrity and security. It will allow you to deliver a ‘single version of the truth’ for every piece of content while introducing a company-wide standard for asset documentation.
Enterprise information access
The second step is to ensure that all documentation is up-to-date, correct and reliable. You have to be able to limit access to only the correct versions. The system must ensure that all changes are made in a systematic and structured way. All rights and security have to be rigorously enforced. Finally, the information has to be accessible quickly wherever and whenever it is needed–including your partners and contractors.
The benefits of xECM for Engineering
OpenText™ Extended ECM (xECM) for Engineering is one of the most comprehensive and widely used engineering and asset information management platforms available. It provides a single, authoritative repository for storing and controlling engineering documents and work processes. The solution helps you efficiently control engineering information, work processes, and risk across the lifecycle of assets and maintenance activities.
Available as two solutions – xECM for Engineering Capital Projects and xECM for Engineering SAP PM Maintenance and Operations – it covers the entire lifecycle of an asset.
The plant maintenance solution supports a wide range of content – including as-build documentation, change management and maintenance execution documentation – that underpin all key maintenance, inspection, repair and operational processes. It delivers traceable and comprehensive documentation of notifications, services tasks and work order execution.
xECM for Engineering facilitates efficient and secure collaboration with interdisciplinary teams and suppliers. It’s seamless integration with SAP Plant Maintenance (PM) and Project System (PS) ensures that all asset and maintenance data is up-to-date and accurate.
FasTrak for Plant Maintenance: Leading through best practice
The powerful engineering and asset information management capabilities of xECM for Engineering can be transformative for your plant maintenance activities. A new service from OpenText, FasTrak for Engineering and Plant Maintenance, allows OpenText customers to benefit from best-practice configurations and accelerate the deployment of the product into the customer´s organization.
The best practice-based configurations include:
- Documentation of maintenance, inspection and repair services: Building a central repository for the documentation of notifications, services tasks and work order execution
- Technical maintenance projects: Enabling the secure and efficient cooperation with contractors
- Controlled engineering documents: Managing documents like as-built drawings or Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) through their revision lifecycle and changes
- Reporting: Tracking completeness, quality and accuracy of all controlled engineering documents
- Document Workspaces with SAP integration: Synchronizing each SAP technical object–such as FLOC, EQUI, WorkOrder TaskList and Notification–as a Document Workspace
The FasTrak service has been designed for quick deployment and rapid scaling through your organization.
If you’d like to know more about xECM for Engineering or FasTrak for Engineering and Plant Maintenance, please contact us.
