It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when taking on a new digital transformation initiative. For SAP Plant Maintenance users, evaluating a mobile plant maintenance solution should be a top priority. But what features are most important in maximizing ROI in asset-intensive industries like oil and gas, mining, utilities and manufacturing?
We’ve put together a checklist of four key features to look for when evaluating what will give you an edge over your competitors.
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Digital operator rounds |
Operator rounds are critical for maintaining asset reliability, sustainability and occupational safety in plant operations. Operators are the eyes and ears of your organization, collecting thousands of data points during a round that you can use to catch issues before they lead to downtime.
Traditional plant maintenance solutions forget operators, forcing them to use paper checklists and clipboards. This manual data gathering leads to loss of critical asset data amid huge volumes of normal data, a time lag between detecting critical issues and notification or work order creation, and data entry errors.
A best-in-class mobile plant maintenance solution should integrate digital operator rounds to drive continuous improvement in your maintenance operations. This allows operators to feed critical rounds data directly into the ERP system like SAP in real-time to make the data accessible from anywhere by any authorized user in the company. Managers can issue notifications and create work orders with almost zero latency to maximize equipment uptime.
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Work order management |
Successful plant maintenance, whether preventive, predictive or reactive, largely depends on efficient coordination between teams. Conventional, paper-based practices delay the creation of work orders and make it harder for facility managers to track their progress in real-time.
Facility managers need to get a 360-degree view of work order execution to ensure the continuity of the production lines. This requires integration of work order management tools with the ERP. Real-time communication between digital operator rounds and work order management help facility managers stay on top of rounds data. Advanced work order management tools offer risk assessment metrics to prioritize work orders.
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Digital work instructions |
The mass of retiring maintenance workers across asset-intensive industries creates a huge skills gap. Young technicians spend most of their time waiting for instructions and support and spend only 25 to 35% of their time on actual work.
This is an opportunity, with the right digital tools, to boost productivity by as much as 57% through increases in direct wrench time for these novice employees. Digital work instructions bridge the skills gap and optimize operations by providing real-time, visual support to field technicians.
Young techs get guided work instructions via mobile devices, eliminating delays and inefficiencies in work order execution. Field technicians get the advantage of intelligent technologies such as augmented reality and virtual voice assistants to get the documentation they need, hands-free in the field. This eliminates hurdles in work order management and enhances data quality.
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Configurable forms and checklists |
Regulatory compliance is a huge challenge in asset-intensive industries. Industrial equipment and processes frequently get upgraded. Environmental and occupational health and safety regulations often change. Facility managers carry the responsibility to ensure the field technicians are aware of the changes and are provided with updated documentation. It’s easy to miss these changes, which can be costly to an organization.
A mobile plant maintenance solution should help managers create updated regulatory forms and checklists from anywhere using mobile devices. This enhances regulatory compliance and saves thousands of dollars (millions sometimes) in fines imposed by regulatory agencies.
Where can you find all these features?
Innovapptive, a leading Connected Worker platform provider, offers a best-in-class mobile EAM solution that integrates these capabilities along with other must-have features like auto time capture, multimedia support, virtual voice assistance, optical character recognition and GIS integration.
To book a customized live demo of our mobile EAM solution, click here.
You can also reach out to us at 1-844-464-6668 and talk to our Connected Worker platform experts.
