Hi All,

I'm not 100% sure if this is the appropriate board, so my sincere apologies if I'm asking in the wrong place.

I currently work on a very big site, and my biggest bug bear ever is the total lack of information. I have done some reading on this site and others, and I get the impression we are quite far off the 'baseline' of what a modern company should know and do about its assets.

The system as it stands is:

1. The CMMS says we did/did not deliver scheduled work, if it's preventative or breakdown work, number of hours (not person-hours) - not all work is scheduled and it doesn't store results of work
2. We have a bespoke EAM that has a hierachy. It includes the responsible engineer's estimates for when things need replaced, how confident we are of the engineer's judgement and how unsafe the asset currently is
3. Design information is somewhere else - either on network drives or a filing cabinet on the other side of the country (things like SLDs are easy to get a hold of, but TRAM, design intent etc quite hard)

We don't keep good records, so for example when electricians go check a fuseboard, they get given a written instruction that'll say "pass if <Z, fail if >Z" so we don't necessarily track or even know what the actual impedance is. Same kind of thing goes for many different assets, and where we do have records it's usually a report from a contractor that floats around the department until someone claims it. Records are really poor, so for example it's impossible to even find out how many defibrilators we have - all entries in the CMMS are inconsistent so you can't rely on looking in there, and our EAM doesn't do those kinds of facts and figures. I can't tell you the Mean Time To Failure or Mean Time to Repair or any assets or systems. I can't tell you how much they cost to own, how much to run, how much to fix. I can't tell you if they meet their design life, if they overperform; most of the time I don't even know when things go obsolete unless I check with the OEM myself.

Everybody seems to know this is a problem, and in my time not much has actually changed, but we have loads of people - Asset Managers, Engineers, Maintenance Managers, Data Scientists, Statisticians - who are all "working on it" in some capacity.

The senior management recently started pushing Big Data, and have a couple of trial networked devices with webpages up that let me see the real-time state of some electrical assets. Although this sounds really impressive, it's a new system in addition to the others, and it doesn't integrate, so it's up to me to check it to see how my assets are doing, and then enter data into the CMMS and EAM myself.

Now, on the surface this sounds like a big improvement, but I'm really cynical. I'm not sure having the numbers up on a screen is really going to help me make better decisions. I think the benefit would come from integrating systems, and using them properly so I can track a breakdown or patterns of breakdowns across common models or manufactures or parts of plant. I don't need to know how my fuseboards or batteries are doing every minute of every day - but I would have liked to know their measurements when they get taken and have these trended.

Am I making sense? I don't think we need this Internet of Things or Big Data stuff, I reckon my employer just needs to use the tools it already has, properly.

After Christmas I have an opportunity to talk to the chap who manages our company and I'm tempted to bring it up since sitting here in isolation, I've convinced myself that I'm totally right and can save us squillions. But before I dare do that I think I need a sanity check.