Asset Documentation – a strategic perspective: Is your documentation an asset or a liability?

By Adrian Butcher (Director Value Engineering EMEA)

Contact Open Text | OTResources@opentext.com 

Asset documentation - how robust?

Any large energy company or utility is a significant asset manager.  A major element of business strategy for such organisations is their approach to asset management, throughout assets' life.  A key aspect of asset management is asset documentation management and whilst most organisations already have significant investments in Asset Management systems and hence a robust fixed asset register, the management of detailed asset documentation may not match this level.

If it's not getting better, it's getting worse

For companies without a strategic approach to asset documentation, the situation may be on a worsening, not improving trend.  Two major trends of recent years make this more than idle speculation.  First, the stable workforces of decades past are increasingly approaching retirement age, as industry analysts have noted.  Second, more and more work has been and is still being contracted out - and often the construction contractor may not be the maintenance contractor, so may be happy just to "dump" documentation on the asset owner.

So, the old model might have been: "we trusted the local guys to maintain good documentation, we may not have insisted on common standards (including metadata), but we could rely on them for their tacit local knowledge". 

As the old model dies, or at least decays, are robust new models in place to take account of more intensive scrutiny of both costs and operational performance?  With Open Text, they can be.

The need for change - is it real?

Of course, it's tempting to observe that the business is running just fine and has been for the last 20, 50, even 100 years.  So why change?  The answer is that the move to private ownership and market competition has brought a new intensity and accountability to management of the bottom line and of business risks.  Bad practice is costing money and always has done, whether it's very expensive repeat surveys of major sites, repeat visits to site caused by outdated information, unnecessary delays to service restoration or preventive maintenance, risking actual outages.  These can all attract unwelcome public scrutiny and regulatory sanctions.  The decline of local knowledge will magnify these problems and make them more apparent.

Defining a strategic approach

If we are to make "a strategic approach" more than just a neat phrase, some guidelines, or tenets, will help define and deliver best practice.  Our mission here is simple - we want documentation itself to be a real business asset, not a liability.

Lifetime and usership definition.  For all of the asset documentation produced, a relatively simple task is to define the lifecycle of each document, who will need to use (access) it and in what circumstances (in office, in plant, in field).  Combined with ownership definition, this will enable access design rights (who can do what with a given document).

Common standards for both documents (via templates) and metadata (the ways in which information is both classified, organised and made easier to aggregate) will make it possible for employees throughout the value chain to find what they need, even if they are new to the particular asset area in question.  It will also enable the design of information packages specifically geared for specific tasks.

Eco-system fit:  This is not a green field.  The business has already made investments in vital systems and - no less importantly - in enabling its people to use them.  If GIS is used as a primary means to locate asset information, for example let that continue.  If people "live" in Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Sharepoint, let them access information through those interfaces.

Extended enterprise:  If your asset management programmes heavily involve the use of contractors, include them in your asset documentation to ensure you both distribute information they need and secure information they produce.  We are aware of one utility whose contractors made specific billings for Information Management, amounting to more than 3% of contract values.

Context:  It may be valuable to provide additional, relevant information around actual asset documentation itself.  So, for example, if there is a need to provide procedural guidance for a field engineer, in addition to detailed information about maintenance or drawings of the asset, why not make that accessible from the same document management system, even pre-packaged with the asset documentation?

Delivering value to utilities asset management today 

Open Text Enterprise Content Management technologies in use with global utilities players, providing asset documentation across the spectrum of physical asset locations.  Major plant documentation is used in generation assets in the United States, Canada, Germany, and the UK, for example.  Grid operators document network assets.  A UK water company can "click" direct from a GIS asset location to maintenance documentation relating to the asset and sought to mirror its main asset management data hierarchy in its asset documentation.  One company has arranged to train 1000 external contractor employees to access project folders in asset delivery projects.

A number of companies worldwide make use of extensive integration with CAD to access and view full CAD file contents - and if need be annotate them - without having a CAD licence.  A UK regional utility is busy creating a management system that will serve all its workers with process and procedural guidance, including its engineering employees.

An enterprise platform 

With most major organisations looking to rationalise their IT systems down to a strategic few, it's also relevant to point out that Open Text information management platforms already support utilities in other areas, like customer service, finance, internal audit, data archive and more, giving genuine enterprise support and broader investment recovery potential. 

If you don't as yet have a cohesive enterprise strategy for asset documentation, a call to Open Text might be one of the best calls you make this year.