The Integrated Maintainer
A White Paper on the importance of information access and configuration control for the 21st Century Technician
By Jan Nestler
Graduate Master of Business and Engineering
Engineering Analyst, Absolute Data Group Pty Ltd.
1. The Challenge
A continuously increasing complexity of assets combined with a growing
demand for technical specialist knowledge of various fields, rising requirements
for data availability and reliability, and cumulating mobility requests define the
basic conditions for every service technician of the 21st century.
As maintaining costs determine the bulk of a company’s asset management
expenses, it is essential to align maintenance equipment and maintenance
processes towards those circumstances.
2. The Requirements
In order to perform successfully in the maintaining field the key is to accurately
manage the three interacting factors product, process and information.
The technician needs a clear descriptive view on the product and its structure,
useful procedural work instructions and accurate scheduled processes without
dispensable information and additional administrative effort.
As such, Information must not become considered as a management or
production burden. Rather, assets and information both need to be managed
together as a set.
Asset complexity continuously accelerates both horizontally in the variety of
subsystems and vertically in the amount of product structure levels.
Contemporaneously the quantity of related information grows by a multiple as
well as the administrative effort. Hence, maintenance needs to be
professionally managed that technicians can concentrate on their core tasks.
As maintenance becomes more and more a collaborative task of different
special disciplines the requirements for networking and workflow management
increase. Legal restraints, e.g. ISO 9001 require detailed process control and monitoring.
Information becomes the most important resource. Providing the technician with
reliable information and guaranteeing the availability of data always and
everywhere is the duty of every officer, especially in terms of job safety.
3. The Solution
3.1. Product/ Configuration Management
Configuration Management is necessary to administrate the asset structure
including product variants and versions. Hence, it is possible to identify, to
locate and to monitor every single component, part, assembly, subsystem and
system throughout its lifecycle.
Configuration Management relates physical items with associated information
and provides the technician with direct access to the right service plan, bill of
material, spare part package, required tools, and additives.
Additionally Configuration Management is responsible for controlling change
processes. Changes in asset configuration (variants) and over time (versions)
have to be monitored and retraced according to legal obligations including their
cause and involved employees.
3.2. Information/ Technical Content Management
Technical Content Management assumes document related tasks. Based on
structured content (S1000D/ S2000M) Technical Content Management
guarantees the availability and reliability of current information, e.g. detailed
work orders, maintenance instructions, drawings or 3D models, service history,
and security advices related to the right product configuration and process.
Moreover it provides the maintainer with information in the demanded media, e.g. hardcopy, PDF, website, VRML-model.
As data access is controlled according to the user’s authorisations technical
authors, engineers in charge and executing maintenance technicians get
aligned access to the required data.
A well-organised content management system is the basis for technical
knowledge sharing throughout a company.
3.3. Process/ Workflow Management
A sophisticated process management system is the absolute prerequisite in
order to control human-resource allocation, arranging task packages,
scheduling work orders, ordering and checking the availability of spare parts
and tools, controlling stocks and trigger service intervals.
Human-resource allocation, for instance, encompasses planning absenteeism
in case of holiday or advanced vocational training and issuing work orders to
the adequate-skilled technician including controlling the employees work
capacity. Briefing the executing maintainer via using prevailing information
devices like PDA, Email/ Blackberry or mobile phone with SMS/ MMS/ WAP
technology is state of the art.
Implemented security routines allow a quick response in case of unscheduled
labour slack and guarantee the process continuity especially in case of urgency
and high preference.
4. The Advantages/ The Benefits
Only an integrated solution that combines information access, product
configuration control and process management throughout the asset lifecycle
resolves “The Traditional Triple Constraints” of business processes, which are
time, costs, and scope.
Time benefits result from reduced search durations for technical information,
spare parts and additives, shortened work order times, parallelisation via
collaboration and optimized chronology of processes.
Benefits of scope such as quality or customer satisfaction arise from error
prevention through the permanent availability of current data. Configuration
control provides clear view and prevents from disconcerting failures, such as
ordering wrong spare parts.
Additionally to these benefits of time and scope cost advantages emerge from
prevention of redundancies in work for authoring documents, maximum job
safety coverage, image gain through better work quality, customer and
employee satisfaction, and increased resource efficiency.
ADG White Paper www.absolutedata.com
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