By Jay West, BS/MS AE, MBA
President, EAM Master
Managing maintenance documents is critical and challenging for Oracle Enterprise Asset Management (eAM) customers. Project Partners offers an exciting new product that streamlines the use of Oracle eAM and Microsoft SharePoint and makes managing maintenance documents easy.
In today’s industrial environment, information drives the efficiency and effectiveness of the maintenance organization. Maintenance managers, planners, and workers use a variety of documents from different sources to maintain complex plant equipment, facilities, and infrastructure. To be productive, they must be able to quickly and easily find, understand and use all of this information.
Much of the information used by the maintenance organization resides in various hardcopy and electronic documents such as drawings, vendor manuals, safety procedures, inspection sheets, repair instructions, etc. Hardcopy documents can be challenging to find, share and use, particularly if needed in multiple locations or job sites. Electronic documents can also be challenging to manage. They often reside on multiple PCs or network locations with little security and version control if they are not in a centralized document management system. Suppose a document management system like SharePoint is in place. In that case, there are still challenges with keeping documents organized, easy to find, and linked to the proper data items and transactions in Oracle eAM.
Oracle eAM offers two options for linking documents to entities like Assets, Activities (job plans), and Work Orders. One option is to use a “File” type attachment to load the document into the Oracle database. The challenge with this option is that it creates additional copies of documents; there is no version control, and the large number of embedded documents tends to bloat the database. The other option is to use a “URL” type attachment that links to the file in a document management system like SharePoint. The challenge with this option is that users must first carefully file documents correctly in SharePoint and then make certain that proper links are established. This option thus requires that users have good knowledge of SharePoint and follow good procedures. It is also laborious and prone to errors.
The Project Partners Document Management Integration product provides a much more complete and automated solution for managing maintenance documents. For example, when a document is attached to an Oracle eAM entity, the product automatically creates an appropriately named folder in SharePoint and then files the document correctly. This level of automation makes the whole process of managing maintenance documents more straightforward and more mistake-proof. I recommend that all Oracle eAM customers evaluate this product to streamline and improve the management of maintenance documents.
About the Author:
Jay West is an author and professional speaker within the professional maintenance community and has been an active member of the Oracle eAM Field Advisory Board for seven years. He holds a Bachelors’s and Masters’s in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan and an MBA from the University of Alabama. Mr. West is also the president and founder of EAM Master LLC.
