What Manufacturers Might Get Wrong About Digital Maintenance Information

Digital doesn't automatically mean better

Industrial businesses have never had access to more information.

Engineering teams work with CAD models, drawings, Bills of Materials, technical manuals, maintenance records and increasingly large amounts of digital data.

Yet having more information doesn't necessarily make maintenance easier.

For the person standing in front of a machine, the important question is often much simpler:

Can I quickly find and understand what I need to do?

That is where some approaches to digital maintenance information can fall short.

Digitising a PDF isn't necessarily digitalisation

One of the simplest ways to digitise a maintenance manual is to turn it into a PDF.

It certainly has advantages. It can be shared electronically, stored centrally and accessed without carrying a paper manual around.

But the underlying information hasn't necessarily changed.

A technician may still have to search through pages of text, drawings and tables to find the relevant procedure.

The information is digital, but the experience of using it may not be significantly different.

This is an important distinction.

Digitalisation should be about improving how information is used, not simply changing the format it is stored in.

More information isn't necessarily better information

Manufacturers often have enormous amounts of engineering information available.

The challenge is making that information useful.

A technician carrying out a repair may not need access to every piece of information about a machine. They need the right information at the right point in the process.

Which component is this?

What needs to be removed?

What order should the steps be carried out in?

Which part is required?

What should I check before putting everything back together?

Good digital maintenance information should help answer those questions rather than simply providing more material to search through.

Start with the maintenance process

Technology can make a significant difference to maintenance, but it works best when it starts with the way people actually work.

Before deciding what software or technology to introduce, it is worth asking:

• Where do people currently struggle to find information?
• Which maintenance tasks are particularly difficult or time-consuming?
• Where is knowledge held by one or two experienced people?
• Which equipment generates the most downtime or support requirements?
• Could engineering information be presented in a way that is easier to understand?

These questions help identify where digitalisation can provide genuine value.

Making engineering information more accessible

This is one of the areas we are particularly interested in at Invisu.

Engineering data such as CAD models contains a huge amount of useful information, but it wasn't necessarily created with the maintenance technician in mind.

Tools such as Invisu Altus can help organisations unlock greater value from existing CAD data by converting engineering models into interactive 3D experiences that are easier to understand, share and use.

Platforms such as Invisu then help organisations improve access to maintenance information through interactive and visual maintenance guidance.

The technology isn't the end goal.

The goal is to make engineering and maintenance knowledge easier for people to use.

Digitalisation should solve a problem

There isn’t a single definition of what "good" digital maintenance looks like.

For one manufacturer, it might mean replacing paper manuals.

For another, it might mean making maintenance procedures easier to follow.

For another, it might be about retaining the knowledge of experienced engineers or giving customers better access to technical information.

The common factor is that the technology should solve a real problem.

The question isn't simply: "How can we make our maintenance information digital?"

It's: "How can we make our maintenance information more useful?"

That is where digital maintenance has the greatest potential.