As maintenance practitioners, we’ve been involved with asset management for over 25 years. During that time, we’ve visited hundreds of industrial asset operations and seen first-hand the challenges that technicians, engineers and managers face to keep assets operating effectively and safely around the clock.
A key issue faced by these operations is the different requirements technicians, engineers and managers have for asset and maintenance management. Sometimes it’s like they are all speaking a different language. In general terms, the technician is looking more practically at how an asset or plant needs to be maintained today. The engineer is thinking in terms of managing risk and employing standards and process to keep things running for the long term. The manager is concerned with ensuring the assets are meeting the requirements of the business such as tonnes moved, cubic meters processes or meters drilled. Being maintenance practitioners as well as technologists, we’ve thought deeply about this problem and how to build a tool that is used by technicians but can easily communicate and collect information in a way that meets the requirements of reliability engineers and managers.
We saw that using our expertise combined with software could be used to help this problem. We started small, by building basic work management tools for our own use and for some long-time customers. Many of our customer had tried existing ‘off-the-shelf’ inspection apps and form-builders to solve their problems but these solutions fell short in meeting the requirements for complex industrial assets. The early success of our first products, and continued encouragement from customers, gave us the confidence to create a new business developing a work management software product.
In September 2023, OnPlan Technologies was acquired by COSOL Global (ASX:COS), a global provider of end-to-end asset management solutions that enable asset-intensive organisations to get the best from their people, process, systems and data.
To read more about the COSOL acquisition of OnPlan Technologies and AssetOn Group Pty Ltd click here.