Your 2020 New Year’s Goal Should be Conducting a Plant Walkdown
A lot of customers ask us what the best place to start in their data quality journey is. There’s really no right answer for this but we have found plant walkdowns to be an extremely effective way to begin on your data quality journey.
Why?
1. Plant Walkdowns Tackle a Variety of Data Issues
Asset Hierarchy Disorganization – Equipment may be in the wrong location. Or maybe you have some data listed as equipment but it should actually be a FLOC. Sometimes your equipment doesn’t drill down to the lowest maintainable level. You may be lacking standardization to define your data hierarchy. A walkdown followed by some data manipulation can fix all of the above.
Missing Equipment – It is very common for maintainable equipment to be missing in your data. Either it was physically moved to another area of the plant, or the data is under the wrong functional location or never added in the first place. A walkdown can indicate all the gaps in your data.
Outdated equipment – You may have the need to move or archive equipment data that is no longer physically installed in the plant. This helps to get rid of the clutter.
Inaccurate Functional Locations – A walkdown can quickly indicate when a functional location is at the wrong level of hierarchy or incorrectly submitted.
Standardization – Walkdowns will identify gaps in your data standards and give a good indication of what standards should be created and implemented.
2. Plant Walkdowns Match Virtual to Reality
The goal of a walk down is to make sure that the physical plant accurately matches your digital plant. This has been proven to improve employee trust in the data made available. Trust increases data usership, the alternative being individuals choosing to store data for their own use, which increases the knowledge gap when they leave the company. For legacy equipment plant walkdowns are often the most efficient and cost-effective way to create an accurate digital twin.
3. Plant Walkdowns Provide you with Data Quality Insight
Many companies could admit that they actually don’t know the full extent of their data quality. It is very hard to measure or get perspective on “How Bad Is My Data?” For those who have no idea what the state of their data is, a walkdown will provide great visibility. The starting point of an efficient walkdown should be the creation of digital dashboards that measure data completeness and can track improvement week to week.
4. Plant Walkdowns Are an Efficient Cleansing Method
Compared to other cleansing methods, walkdowns are one of the most time and cost-effective ways to cleanse data. When used in combination with a productivity tool such as NRX AssetHub, the data manipulation required post-walkdown is highly accurate, automated, and efficient.
5. Plant Walkdowns Provide a Holistic Approach
Dealing with excel to manipulate data can really bog you down. By doing a plant walkdown you can gather a complete visual understanding of your plant. Take pictures while conducting the walkdown so that you can add data, such as the jpegs, and nameplate information directly to the equipment and functional location. This allows for a more holistic view of the plant. When workers need to maintain equipment, they can view related pictures, spare parts lists, BoMs, and so much more.
How NRX AssetHub Helps
Resolve differences between assets, inventory, and digital data. NRX AssetAuditors (apart of NRX AssetHub Platform), is a plant and warehouse auditing solution that helps asset-intensive companies match their physical assets to their digital representations and capture and load any missing data. Our customers benefit from using NRX AssetAuditors by affirming that their physical assets are represented correctly in their CMMS or EAM systems (SAP PM, IBM Maximos, Infor EAM, IFS, Oracle EAM…). Consequently, when a work order is generated, our customers are assured the equipment resides where it is expected to be, and the necessary parts are available to correct the issue.
Keep reading on how to conduct visual plant audits below…
Share this article
