Challenges
Maintenance staff spend an inordinate amount of time on each maintenance task looking for and verifying technical information about the existing plant. Most of the information is contained in documents and these are scattered on various internal systems, SharePoints, file spaces and even locally on individual computers.
Once the information is found, it is usually conflicting information in different documents. It usually ends up with someone having to go out into the plant and see what is actually installed.
The same problem is encountered when projects for the reconstruction and extension of the plant are to be carried out. Inspections by the authorities require a lot of staff to be on stand-by to look for the information sought by the inspectors.
Solution
Plantvision an unbiased preliminary study and proposed a number of measures that affected both working methods and IT systems. Among other things, COMOS DDMS (Document and Data Management System) was introduced, where the plant register was built up as a graphical structure. Existing documentation was imported and linked to the respective equipment or plant component. The data that was available, generally in Excel, was imported to the respective objects.
In a second step, COMOS was integrated with the existing maintenance system so that work orders could be initiated there and then be available in COMOS where all relevant information, both data and documents, could be linked to the work order.
Result
The fact that staff can now search for all relevant information in one system - and trust the results - saves a lot of time and reduces stress. Inspections are carried out with significantly fewer people on standby and fewer lumps in the stomach.
There has also been a change in the way of working so that technical data is entered into COMOS from the start and then documents are generated from within COMOS for those cases where documents are needed for practical or regulatory reasons. A solution is now available that is searchable, credible, efficient and meets the high standards of quality and traceability.
