Are Your Maintenance Documents Being Managed? Or Are They Managing You?

Maybe you have a cabinet of binders chock full of important engineering and maintenance documents, or a stack of books fifteen feet high. Or perhaps you are more environmentally responsible, and you have a drawer full of USBs, or a network drive full of PDFs. Or even better, you might have a corporate document management system (DMS) that stores all of your engineering and maintenance documentation in one big database you search through each time you need to access maintenance instructions or find a list of critical spare parts. So which of these methods is best? None of the above.

That’s not to say that it isn’t kinder to the environment to use PDFs instead of paper, or that it isn’t smart to use a DMS. It’s just that none of these is a complete solution to finding the right piece of information, at the right time.

Putting It in Perspective

Say you are a typical asset-intensive company, with several sites, and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment to be maintained. To perform routine maintenance, you need to access many different documents in different places.

Obviously, paper isn’t the answer. If you keep printed documents with every piece of equipment, they’re going to get lost, dirty, or worn out. And keeping them in a central location won’t help the guy needing to access it from a remote place.

Keeping all of your documents on a network drive still requires searching through thousands of documents for the correct one. As a result, many asset-intensive companies are moving their maintenance and operations documentation into a DMS. Smarter? Yes. But effective? Not always.

Many companies find that, as they move their maintenance documentation into a DMS, they still can’t find the information they need in a timely manner. Why? Because, when a document is loaded into the DMS, the appropriate metadata isn’t loaded with it. Metadata is the data that describes the document, providing information such as the manufacturer, the model number, year of manufacture, the type of guide, and any other information that makes it easier to distinguish one document from thousands of others.

Check the Math:

Assume it takes a maintenance worker 20 minutes to locate the right piece of information in the right guide. And assume you have 100 maintenance personnel accessing maintenance documents each week. That’s 33 hours (or .8 of a maintenance worker) lost per week, searching for information!

What if all of the metadata for a document was automatically loaded into the DMS with the document? Anyone searching the DMS could quickly find the maintenance schedule for a Goulds pump, model NM3198. And what if the documents for every piece of equipment were available to a maintenance technician directly from their EAM or CMMS work order? You could eliminate virtually all of the time spent looking for the right information.

Lead the Pack

Asset-intensive companies use NRX AssetHub to provide a 360° view of maintenance and engineering information. NRX AssetHub automatically organizes and indexes maintenance documents into their corporate document management system, such as EMC Documentum, SAP DMS, BlueCielo, and others. When assets or their attributes change, our customers easily keep the organization and indexes up to date, saving maintenance workers time locating the latest engineering data and drawings.

One Customer Says the Following:

“NRX AssetHub allows us to not only effectively manage the information for current assets in our plant, but also manage the flows of information as those assets change and grow over time. This brings accurate information to the right person at the right time, to make the right decision.”

Let NRX AssetHub take the lead, and rein in those documents.

About NRX AssetHub

NRX AssetHub provides maintenance and reliability professionals at asset-intensive businesses with world-class software solutions for analyzing, visualizing, building, editing, organizing, approving, and sustaining high-quality Asset and Maintenance Data for the Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Computerized Maintenance Management (CMMS) systems. We help our customers get their CMMS data right.

In his February 3^rd blog post, “Necessity is the mother of invention”, Greg Dee described how our customers have helped us discover use cases for NRX AssetHub: performance standards compliance, visual parts catalog, ISO 14224 hierarchy alignment, and today’s topic about asset engineering and maintenance document management.

Stay tuned as we explore these use cases in future posts.