Get ready for the future with asset information management
Water companies will have an ever-increasing amount of engineering documents, drawings, and related data to monitor as they implement new connected technologies which provide data that can help them provide clean water at a reasonable price, amid the fallout of environmental issues such as plastic soup, fracking, and spills.
Water treatment plants, tasked with goals to reduce CO2 emissions and to do a better job of extracting heavy substances from wastewater and transforming waste into energy, will also benefit from the new monitoring technologies and the data they provide. These goals will be difficult to achieve with disparate systems.
In relation to this, the three common shortfalls most companies experience today are:
When there's no structured way for external parties to access documents, it compromises security. Compiling reports which involves having to pull data from disconnected, antiquated sources wasted valuable time, and not being able to quickly access critical information during an unplanned shutdown cripples responsiveness.
Some companies still maintain outdated processes that make managing the flood of engineering documents unreliable and make working with external vendors difficult. For instance many companies manually check that the documents submitted by the supply chain are compliant to agreed-upon standards. This often faces them with the difficult scenario of not knowing if something was wrong until it's too late.
When errors creep into documentation, companies often waste money on human labour trying to rectify these issues. Using outdated documents often leads to rework, project delays, cost overruns and safety incidents - all of which negatively impace the Profit & Loss ( P&L) statement and balance sheet.
Tackling the challenges of managing an ever-increasing load of engineering documents and drawings while remaining regulatory-compliant is a major challenge. The more documents and drawings in an archive, the more challenging the task, and the greater the need for a specialised platform to manage them. As a result, we've seen a number of utilities companies start to adopt asset information management systems like Meridian. Hear how they are using the system...
"With the help of Meridian, we have made 50,000 documents easily accessible to designers, project teams, and others who need to have access to these documents.”