Nothing’s better than a family road trip on spring break! Except when, two hours into an 8-hour drive, our car unexpectedly broke down. Despite weeks of meticulous planning, the sudden stop threw our best laid plans into disarray. Our efficient timeline was upended. We needed to quickly determine the cause and a fix so we could get on our way because as they say when you’re on vacation, time is money.
Just like a car breakdown, unplanned downtime happens without warning, disrupting normal operations and causing immense frustration. As our breakdown significantly delayed our travel, unplanned downtime halts production, taking operations offline and causing significant costs to fix. The average chemical manufacturing loses 32 production hours each month due to unplanned downtime at a cost of $220,000 per hour or $84 million per year. Yes, unplanned downtime causes lost production, but it can also lead to additional costs such as mechanical damage, reduced energy efficiency, environmental or regulatory fines, and potential legal liabilities. Just like our urgency to get our car moving again, it is important in a plant to quickly assess the problem and find a solution.
Minimizing unplanned downtime is the most significant challenge faced by chemical manufacturing companies. Unplanned downtime is often caused by human error, lack of emergency planning, and equipment failure. To address human error, you could invest in employee training, process automation, robust quality control systems, checklists/SOPs, enterprise software, etc. It could cost millions of dollars and have no effect on unplanned downtime if the time-critical data needed by engineering, maintenance, and field teams is inaccessible, incorrect, or incomplete.
Proper document management is critical to the productivity and success of your operations, maintenance, engineering, and construction teams within a manufacturing plant. EDM systems ensure essential documents can be sourced quickly, automate version control to enable a single source of truth, and align as-built documentation with ongoing projects to avoid costly mistakes. In the event of a critical malfunction or outage, manufacturing teams need fast access to accurate information and the ability to reference accurate versions of documents. Regulatory requirements and industry standards also require organizations to validate document control, data integrity and traceability.
Your company needs a common platform that delivers a unified view of engineering and business content with a single source of truth. Adept provides the control and automation to drive best practices and simplify compliance. Adept offers:
- Increased safety and reliability through 24/7 access to accurate documents and drawings which streamlines routine or emergency operations while reducing accidents, outages and liability.
- Automating and streamlining processes for regulatory compliance helps manufacturing facilities meet deadlines, avoid fines and reduce administrative overhead.
- Empowers maintenance teams to make confident decisions based on a single source of data; never having to second guess whether the version they’re looking at is the latest and greatest. Higher employee effectiveness is promoted through higher confidence in a centralized system of data and collaboration in real time.
- Delivers higher uptime with fewer equipment failures and safety incidents. When they do occur, Adept improves response time by helping workers act faster and more proactively, even under pressure.
Adept manages all plant documentation for a process plant running 24/7/365. Access to current plant conditions, vendor documentation, installation and operating manuals are all available by searching the equipment tag number.”
—Paul Opiela, Document Control Supervisor, Aux Sable Liquid Products
In addition to improved profitability from higher uptime (see real customer value at right), employee morale and productivity also improve with a highly effective engineering document management system that supports the whole manufacturing team and its streamlined processes.
Have you considered what your engineering documents are really worth to your manufacturing?
