Podcast: Why Digitalization Equals Proactive Maintenance

It really stemmed from a need that we observed at the time, but I think it's also very prevalent still today. Many teams, they still rely on physical log books, an actual book, to document the shift information. And while these books serve as a central repository of sorts, accessing the data within them is incredibly cumbersome. Simple tasks like just browsing the earlier reports, identifying trends among them, or even pinpointing specific issues that have occurred, it's nearly impossible without investing too much of your own time, and time is a very valuable asset. 

For me, digitizing the process brings a very significant advantage. First of all, what digitization does is it opens up access to this very critical and very valuable data, to a larger audience. Instead of it being confined to a physical book, the information becomes accessible across teams, across departments, across the entire organization. And since it is also indexed in such a way that it becomes easy to search, you're able to find exactly the information that you're looking for very easily and make sensible decisions there. What it does then is it turns the logbook, the handover logbook, into a source of reference. 

Second of all, what this also does – digitizing the information and placing it into a CMMS or EAM system – allows you to create meaningful relationships between pieces of data. You could, for example, relate all of the information pertaining to a particular asset or a component of that asset on the asset or component level. So a team can easily look back and find out everything that has been reported on said asset or the component during a shift. Even if no further maintenance activity is required, that is still very useful information to have as a maintenance department. So you're bridging a gap, a communication gap, if you will, between those different departments, and really enriching the asset registration as a whole. 

Finally, the power of these digital solutions for me also extends greatly into reporting and analytics. By integrating the data that you have with tools like Power BI, organizations can start generating very insightful dashboards, very insightful reports. By this approach, not only does your team realize a very clear safe and compliant record of the asset history; you're also generating valuable insights that you can use for decision making. From these insights, what you're then able to do is you're taking confident decisions with regards to how you invest into the asset life cycle and extending the asset life cycle, how you go about improving reliability and boosting productivity within the workplace.

So in essence, for effective shift handovers, my take is they're largely enabled by the sort of structured digital processes, such as a centralized EAM platform. What these shift handovers do is they create clarity, they drive smarter and data-driven decision making, which at the end of the day benefits the entire organization.