Asset-intensive organizations rely heavily on their maintenance and reliability teams to help facilitate large project roll-outs. These groups must capture, organize, and manage vast amounts of maintenance, engineering, and design data for the assets involved in the projects. They capture data for their assets, such as operating specifications, engineering documents, recommended spare parts lists, parts catalogs, maintenance guides, recommended maintenance procedures, and more. Ensuring that the data meets the requirements of the organization that will maintain and operate the assets is a huge task that can be virtually unmanageable without tools to simplify and aid the process.

Let’s take a closer look at the ways in which poor quality data complicates maintenance and reliability initiatives within your organization.

Capital Projects and Information Handover

A capital build project for an asset-intensive business typically requires a long time to complete, with many groups contributing data, including vendors, suppliers, and EPCs. Data comes in many formats: from drawings, files, spreadsheets, and engineering databases. Asset-intensive organizations may input data for hundreds of thousands of assets from spreadsheets into an EAM/CMMS system such as IBM Maximo, SAP PM, Oracle eAM, Infor EAM, and others as part of a capital build. Managing the data from these spreadsheets manually can result in duplication of data, data being overwritten or omitted, and so on. Yet, it is this asset and maintenance data upon which corporate maintenance strategies, maintenance personnel planning, and spare parts inventories are based. If the data is not accurate or complete, neither are any of the resulting plans and strategies.

Incomplete and inaccurate EAM and CMMS data results in:

· An inability to correctly staff a project with maintenance workers

· An inability to optimize spare parts inventories

· An inability to estimate the actual time to complete the maintenance tasks

· An inability to start full production as early as possible

· An inability to trust the reliability, asset performance, or safety guards in place during early operations

New EAM Implementations

A new EAM implementation experiences the same issues with incomplete and inaccurate data as a capital build project. Organizations may attempt to move their existing data into a new EAM system such as IBM Maximo, SAP PM, Oracle eAM, Infor EAM and others, and fail to clean up the data as part of the process. At the same time, they may be loading data for new assets. Without the ability to visualize the data, they may create duplicate assets, overwrite assets, and compromise other important business goals in the process. They also find it very difficult to assess the completeness of their data.

Incomplete and inaccurate EAM and CMMS data results in:

· Poor performance of the new EAM system

· Sub-optimal maintenance performance

· Increased time required to complete the implementation

· An inability to correctly update staffing

· An inability to optimize spare parts inventories

· An inability to ensure assets can be operated safely and effectively

· An inability to estimate the actual time to complete maintenance tasks

Operational Changes to Asset

Assets in an asset-intensive organization are seldom static. New assets are added, assets are decommissioned and retired, or moved to a new location. Assets are upgraded, engineering changes are made, and parts are replaced.

Asset modification is complex, requiring a high degree of coordination between various activities, including project design, cost estimates, procurement, project fulfillment, and documentation. The need to continue to support ongoing production capacity while changing, all the while maintaining safety and cost control, can be extremely challenging. Information produced from many sources must be available, at the same time as data is changing.