Problem
Companies with equipment intensive operations need systems that can support the reduction of breakdowns, sustain operations and remain competitive. Many tend to invest in procuring, implementing and maintaining large generic enterprise systems (SAP, Maximo) to manage their business.
The expectation that bottom line benefits in integrity and maintenance can be realised in specialist environments by such a generic approach is often misplaced and can often result in significant process gaps to;
Manage production risks
Manage impact of failures and deterioration
Meet the immediate needs of the production system
Root Cause
This situation can be accredited to a single root cause. A technology gap within the generic enterprise system to facilitate effective management of reliability of equipment & integrity of the plant.
This situation ultimately results in the inability to predict or prevent failures, poor response to loss of integrity, reduced productivity, inability to sustain operations safely and profitably and is directly related to the reduced lifetime of many assets.
Opportunities for Improvement
We have identified two distinct areas for improvement;
Improving the functionality for the end user will provide higher quality data input and use
Adding a digital interface to provide a structure and integrating activities related to the management of failure reporting, analysis & defining corrective actions
Justification
The laws of change management are clear. It is a relatively simple task to create and sustain improvements in an organisation if a new way of working makes an employee’s job easier. They will embrace technology without question if it benefits them to do so. Without functionality and an enjoyable user experience change is unsustainable.
