When engineering and operations drift apart, getting the full picture of an asset can feel like assembling a puzzle – and one whose pieces are scattered in several boxes around the house.
The common starting point: maintenance systems know what is happening to an asset, while engineering systems know what the asset is, how it was designed and what it is connected to. A work order may say that pump P-101 has high vibration or needs a seal replacement, yet the technician may still need a separate P&ID, vendor manual, equipment datasheet, maintenance history and current configuration before the work can be understood safely.
Industrial companies have traditionally felt this problem after project handover and throughout years of sustaining engineering. Project data is delivered into document repositories, engineering tools and handover packages, while the operating organization builds a separate history in a EAM or CMMS system. Later modifications deepen the separation if drawings, tag data and maintenance records do not remain synchronized.
The problem is widespread: Research on industrial maintenance has identified information unavailability, poor information sharing and information-integrity problems as leading knowledge-management difficulties. In a survey of industrial executives that Octave carried out last year, 58% said their teams spent too much time manually reconciling data between systems and 62% saw a negative financial impact from their inability to piece together information on asset performance.
The three frictions at the core of sustaining engineering
Specifically, these teams run into three distinct challenges that sustaining engineering brings to the surface, each one compounding as an asset accumulates changes over its life:
The first issue, slow decision-making and constant context switching, is the time between an operational signal and a defensible action. If a technician gets an alert about a pump, they should not have to hunt through three different systems to find the maintenance history, the vendor documentation and the spare-parts spec, yet on a mature asset that context is exactly what a long history of changes tends to create.
Maintenance research describes technicians spending substantial time searching for work orders and related repair information, particularly where search results are irrelevant or reports have poor data quality. One chemical-processing-plant study measured average technician “wrench time” at only 28 percent, with crew averages ranging from 20 to 35 percent, numbers that show how much maintenance time disappears into activities around the repair rather than the repair itself.
The second issue is the data drift between engineering and operations. A lack of synchronization and common asset identifiers between engineering and maintenance records increases the risk that critical context, such as a change in design or location or the replacement of a piece of equipment.
Over time, this leads to a third issue: decisions made on low-quality data. Any attempt to make maintenance more predictive, for example, will run into the fact that information is fragmented, which makes recurring failure patterns harder to recognize and weakens the value of the asset history, when the information is not downright wrong.
Hence, the importance of a single source of truth across engineering and operations.
Building a lifecycle digital thread to solve data continuity
Octave InConcert (formerly HxGN SDx2), our connected digital twin solution, is tailored to address these three challenges by connecting engineering, operations and maintenance information across the asset lifecycle. It often teams up with Octave Attune EAM (formerly HxGN EAM) to manage the execution of work.
InConcert keeps the user anchored to the asset: the work order can be viewed against the equipment in the model, while related drawings, specifications, history and planned work remain reachable through the same asset context.
One domain where this proves immensely useful is sustaining engineering, where the larger gain comes from preserving continuity between a change project and the operating asset that inherits it. A pump modification can be reviewed against current engineering information, then remain connected to later maintenance activity rather than becoming another disconnected project package. InConcert creates a digital thread that supports that lifecycle vision, including engineering change, visualization and operations, for full digital continuity across phases. Engineering change, visualization and operations, for full digital continuity across phases.
A core benefit that operations and maintenance teams will understand is the ability to work with a common picture of the same asset, without the need to hunt for and reconstruct information across multiple disconnected systems. Engineers, operators and maintainers can rely on a common lifecycle environment that contextualizes engineering, operations and maintenance information.
Companies stand to gain in many ways: greater productivity of, and focus for, specialists, fewer avoidable errors, faster troubleshooting and the ability to track cost and risk across the lifecycle without manual data wrangling. And, in sustaining engineering, where yesterday’s project change becomes tomorrow’s operating configuration and next year’s maintenance problem, the combination of better and faster decisions and data continuity extend far beyond the project itself.