Digital maintenance manual: Direct access to information on the maintenance status

For production facility operators, the maintenance of components, machinery and systems is part and parcel of day-to-day operations. These tasks are undertaken by either the in-house Servicing department or by external service providers.

Maintenance work serves to keep machines and systems in good working order and to slow the rate of wear or, ideally, stop it in its tracks. Depending on the application, some maintenance tasks may also form part of the operator's obligations which, in extreme cases, may be imposed upon the operator by authorising bodies.

Maintenance tasks may differ depending on the machine type or system, and may include, for example, the cleaning of parts, the preventative replacement of parts, or the application and use of consumables (e.g. the lubrication of moving parts).

The component, system and machine manufacturers' specifications and instructions are used as the basis for maintenance work. The documentation that is provided to the operator to accompany these products usually describes the necessary maintenance procedures, the required parts, the applicable safety information, and the level of skill that technicians and engineers working on these products must have. System and machine builders use the maintenance instructions provided by the component manufacturers and supplement these with their own maintenance information based on the machine or system in question.

The operator often transfers all this information to a piece of dedicated maintenance software that enables them to schedule and coordinate routine maintenance tasks. This software also ensures that the requisite tools and parts are available when they are needed. However, the transfer process is a manual task that requires a huge amount of time and effort for everyone involved because the information is often only provided as part of the operating instructions. The required maintenance information must be extracted from the documents and then entered into the maintenance software. To do this, a resource-intensive, manual copy & paste approach is often adopted.

The digital maintenance manual, which can be implemented in the Maintenance submodel of an asset administration shell, promises to be a vast improvement on this. The Maintenance submodel allows all parties along the value creation chain to share all the necessary maintenance information in an interoperable format. This makes it significantly easier to collate the required maintenance data and integrate it into the maintenance software, meaning that users can say goodbye to manually copying & pasting. This new solution considerably improves the quality of maintenance information, and makes coordinating everything – from the individual components to the finished system – a whole lot simpler.

If this solution is used consistently across the board, it will massively simplify maintenance work in the field and will allow this work to be digitally documented on site. All the technician or engineer on site has to do is scan the QR code on the digital nameplate in order to gain direct access to all the required maintenance information from the product's asset administration shell. Additionally, the QR code on the digital nameplate can be used to identify the product (asset) in the customer's own maintenance software and directly digitally document the work that has been carried out. This ultimately also eliminates the need to digitise completed paperwork such as paper checklists, which are frequently still used today.