How Do You Accelerate Asset Data Capture? The Solution is to Go Digital and Utilize Crowdsourcing

One of the most critical basis for any maintenance strategy is a thorough and accurate record of plant data assets. Emerson is always looking for tools and methodologies to improve both the data integrity and increase the efficiency of data collection. We found an unique and successful approach with software solutions provider ORDITAL.

This new approach changes the traditional manual-entry paradigm through wireless access, real-time diagnostics and crowdsourced expertise. It replaces the need to gather asset data from difficult-to-reach locations and manually transfer that data to CMMS spreadsheets – a time-consuming process prone to errors, resulting in unreliable data and ineffective maintenance practices.

Digital Data Capture allows technicians to take pictures of assets and asset tags using ORDITAL’s secure app on a smartphone, speeding data collection rates from 100 to more than 300 assets per day and reducing time spent in hazardous plant areas. Technicians send the images—sanitized of any location data—to a managed crowdsource pool of maintenance technicians and other industry professionals that quickly identifies and annotates the images with the appropriate name plate, tag and vendor data. ORDITAL then reconnects this content with location data and returns it to the customer, formatted with Emerson best practice templates for fast entry into the CMMS.

Technicians can also use voice-to-text capability on their smartphones to add notes to the assets as photographs are collected, streamlining the identification and data entry process even further.

“Maintenance and reliability teams expecting high quality output from their CMMS need to ensure that it is populated with the highest quality data,” said Scott McWilliams, vice president of global operations consulting, Emerson Automation Solutions. “Digital Data Capture provides reliability teams with faster, more accurate data, building a foundation toward a digital transformation of their reliability program.”

Organizations can entirely outsource asset image collection and identification to Emerson or have plant personnel collect images with Emerson providing data management assistance. Emerson is the exclusive provider of ORDITAL’s technology for the process industries.

What are you doing to improve your maintenance programs?