Digital, integrated and mobile maintenance content is a major source of asset management efficiencies and improvement. Trouble is, most operations are faced with the digitisation of tens of thousands of maintenance checklists, forms and often, very complex work instructions.
Consequently, most operations are seeking ways to improve the scale of their digitisation and documentation processes. Scalability can be achieved with automation, repeatability and clever workflow. Here’s 4 key tips that have worked for OnPlan and our clients.
All that time and effort invested in existing asset management doesn’t have to go to waste. Existing PDF, Word, Excel documents can be used to build a foundation of digital documents, boosting the scale of your digitisation program.
Some digital document management tools allow you to import various equipment strategies, FMECA records, 2D & 3D models, photos and checklists - whether they’re in Microsoft Excel, Word, or PDFs to quickly establish baseline digital maintenance content. For instance, OnPlan users can:
Important: While importing existing content can be a great kick-starter to your digitisation program, don’t fall into a trap of not optimising your documents for the digital format and consumption. There’s massive opportunity to build value and efficiencies when shifting to a digital presentation of maintenance work.
When digitising maintenance content, you’ll achieve greater scale by building repetitive components of maintenance process or documents, rather than completing individual documents, forms or checklists.
By breaking maintenance documents up into re-usable elements, it’s quicker and easier to generate multiple document variations for different equipment, sites or regions.
For example, isolating equipment is a task required for most offline work. The work steps to isolate equipment can be built and reviewed once, and then used in each task requiring these steps.
If there is a need to the update steps, this can be done once and applied to all, saving time to update and avoiding missing an important update.
Examples of re-useable elements of your documentation includes:
OnPlan allows a user to search, select and reuse any repeatable elements against different assets and in multiple documents. A maintenance-centric documentation workflow dramatically improves the scalability of the process for asset-intensive organisations.
In addition to gaining scale building documents, another key benefit to breaking digital documentation down into re-usable components is:
When broken into elements, document updates are also much easier and much more scalable. For instance, if statutory change mandates changes to the frequency of inspections on a piece of equipment, OnPlan tracks every instance of that element. Once edited and approved, updates are made to all relevant documents so that all users have only the latest version of the digital document.
Whether for digital or paper maintenance content, a technical writer is often writing and formatting at the same time. This includes planning how and when to capture data, limits like mandatory fields + more.
Rather, focus on content to improve the scalability of the documentation process. Formatting each component or step can be handled by the software.
This approach not only speeds up the writing process, it improves maintenance document quality in other ways:
Consistency in the documentation of work is important for the teams executing the work. But standardisation is also great for scale, helping you and other documenters to build effective and consistent documents with maximum efficiency.
Either find a writing guide or build one, setting standards for elements such as:
Similarly, a documentation workflow will also help. Here’s an example of a logical structure to many operations which can be made up of repeatable elements (as per Tip 2).
OnPlan is a no-code digital document management solution built to improve the scale and efficacy of work management documentation processes, end-to-end.
Users can build, manage and deploy digital maintenance content that easily scales across the company. This means operations and maintenance teams can work safer, smarter and realise more value from complex industrial assets.
For a demo, contact OnPlan.
