It’s human nature, it really is. It doesn’t matter what industry or solution you’re involved with. Eventually, it will catch up with you. Work arounds. Short cuts. Undocumented processes. Multiple systems. Employee turnover. Lack of training. This list, albeit not exhaustive, undoubtedly results in incomplete, incorrect, old, and duplicate data in your Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system. In other words, you have bad data.
Here at HubHead, we work with many customers who have identified during their implementation or migration to a new Enterprise Asset Management system (EAM) that their data is “bad”. We’ve actually seen situations where data has been “left behind” in the old EAM system because it simply wasn’t good enough to bring into the new environment. Our customers realize that in order to receive full return on investment from their new EAM implementation, they will need to fix their data. It is, without question, the life-blood of their maintenance operations.
Data is the Life Blood
Data quality initiatives are nothing new in the world of IT. The vast proliferation of software vendors that provide Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) and other data quality software tools are proof of this. What we at HubHead do differently, using our NRX AssetHub solution, is provide critical asset and maintenance data context during the data quality initiative. We’ve found that in the world of EAM data, it is not as simple as looking for missing address lines or incorrect country codes. To truly ensure that EAM data is correct you must inspect it it with your “maintenance hat” on. Can you view hierarchies? Understand the asset and its associated objects and relationships? Validate data against your corporate maintenance standards? Identify critical equipment and focus there first to ensure you’re reducing operational risk?
Customers must not be charmed by the IT-driven data quality solutions that are so prevalent in the market which state they can do “anything”. To truly clean your EAM data, you must use a solution that provides valuable maintenance and asset context for your business users to enable them to get the data right, and keep it right.
What do you think? Do you feel like the data in your EAM/CMMS system is unique, clean, and high quality?
Jamie Watters
Vice-President, Products
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