With billions of dollars of losses caused by unplanned downtime, manufacturing companies are turning to EDMS solutions with the goal of updating their maintenance programmes and thereby reducing downtime.

Generally speaking, digitizing at any level improves efficiency but keep in mind that a modern EDMS is more than an electronic or digitized document management system; it is an intelligent integrated system designed to help managers proactively keep track of documents ranging from work order history to bills of materials to the various other types of documents and drawings associated with an asset. It is capable of streamlining maintenance processes to such a degree that not only does the downtime get reduced, maintenance costs drop as well. In fact with EDMS-enabled digital Asset tracking the maintenance team can go for preventive maintenance or replacement, which helps to budget and plan better to solve various issues associated with maintenance, which in turn affects the overall operations budget.

Why are EDMS solutions so effective in reducing downtime? The main benefit is that they offer centralized version control which has a ripple effect on the company’s entire bottom line. How? Consider this: maintenance workers need the latest versions of drawings and documents to do their jobs but they rely on a paper-based document management system which doubles their workload and also puts them at risk of losing out on critical information when urgently needed. So by resolving these issues the  EDMS directly reduces the amount of breakdowns and downtimes and as the life of expensive equipment is boosted thanks to effective and timely maintenance (and the company is able to carry out preventive/predictive maintenance) the overall labor productivity also increases significantly.

Let’s look at the 3 main bottlenecks that are solved with an EDMS’s centralized version control capabilities:

1. Change management. Historically speaking,  change management is one of the biggest issues in ensuring effective plant maintenance and preventive maintenance. With a manually-driven procedure, it is almost impossible for teams to know who made a change to a document, when it was made, and why – and that lack of information can create a lot of problems down the line.

2. Information handoffs. In a typical work scenario, you have no way of knowing for sure that the huge volume of information being handed over is accurate and up to date, especially considering that most teams use different systems.

3. Separate systems. Following from the previous point, without an EDMS to consolidate the systems between maintenance and engineering or integrate the data into a single database you end up with siloed information and disparate processes which are neither efficient nor effective.

The above might sound like minor bottlenecks that have been going on for decades but in today’s world, the cumulative snowball effect can be disastrous.

For example, let’s say you’re part of a team responsible for the preventive maintenance of some critical piece of machinery at a plant. To do your job you need to have access to core asset information materials like drawings, operating and plant maintenance procedures, vendor manuals, etc., as well as other documents related to P&IDs and process flow diagrams. However, you use a paper-based process to manage these documents and so you have to look through thousands of documents and you’re never 100% sure the version you have is actually the latest version. But then one day your employer implements an EDMS. Now suddenly your work situation is vastly different! Now you have something you never had before ie a single source of truth for all engineering documentation – ie no more accidental duplicates, no more obsolete/old data. Instead, every member of your team has direct access from his mobile device to the documents he needs and thanks to the in-built centralized version control system it is without doubt the latest version. So the time needed to find a document drops, your employer saves thousands of man-hours, and you find yourself completing work orders in record time.

Another benefit of having an EDMS in this scenario is that your company can purchase the equipment early on in the engineering phase, thus avoiding the chance of ordering the wrong spare parts because of inaccurate or outdated documents.

In other words, an EDMS simplifies core-asset information needs by setting up workflows for the processes of creating, updating, and accessing that information, and it stores that information in a central location. This centralized document version control helps teams to easily find the information they need and carry out their work requests efficiently, and by integrating the information and breaking down silos between different departments, they have time anywhere access to ever-changing engineering information whenever and wherever they need – ie the EDMS unifies maintenance & engineering departments in real time.

To conclude, any process-driven organization looking to streamline plant maintenance or set up preventive maintenance procedures in order to reduce its downtime would do well to invest in a high-quality EDMS.