5 features of Effio that will help you streamline asset management deployment

Our recently launched software, Effio™, allows organisations to hold accurate, comprehensive and structured data on their assets, understand its impact across all different aspects and make informed decisions before uploading it to your CMMS, ERP or EAM. It acts as a staging area for your data, pulling it from a repository and into a system that makes it concise, consistent, and approved, before being allocated.

This is a bit of a novel concept. Usually teams are trying to manage the data within the tool that they’re working with, but what we’re advocating – based on many years of experience – is that those teams need an appropriate tool to build or change data, along with any further changes that are required on linked data, then the correct technical approval is required. Once that is in place then optimisation activities can be conducted. 

Effio™ is a tool that enables you to do that, putting structured and consistent data sets across your business in place and taking account of the whole process first.

In this blog post, ABL’s Head of Technical and the one of the brains behind Effio™, Stuart Murray, has shared 5 of Effio™ key features that will help you build and deploy an effective asset management regime, and elevate plant performance as a result.

1. Identify and capture the asset register data you need

“A key feature of Effio™ is that it allows you to effectively build asset register data and maintain reliability, performance and efficiency of the plant you’re managing.

“Start by considering whether the information on a piece of equipment deserves to be in the CMMS, and what kind of information you want to record about it. This can become very complex but to simplify, we suggest that if it physically exists in the plant, it should be in your CMMS. If the equipment is used for isolation purposes, for instance, you will probably want to record that and make sure it works when you need it to.

“Effio™asks various questions to help you determine which information and equipment pieces you want to store on the system. It will drive you to ask ‘does the item require individual recording inspections’ for instance. If so, it can go straight to be included in the CMMS, but if it doesn’t require records of maintenance, you have to work out whether it’s even maintainable or not, does it perform part of the boundary package, and other considerations like this.

“Once Effio™ has helped you identify the information you want to keep in the CMMS, then you can think about how to extract data from a P&ID, electrical drawings and data sheets. Effio™ can hold links to the marked up drawing and data sheets used to populate the asset register. ABL has a data extraction tool that can scrape data from generic information from a catalog, or bills of materials that are more data driven, as well as instrumentation diagrams.

“When you store the data in Effio™ for a P&ID, you will see there is a wealth of information to provide you with plenty of context of the item. There are different single line tags, block tags, parent blocks, as well as drawing numbers, P&ID numbers, page numbers, revision numbers – all the information that would be in the bottom right hand corner of your P&ID, which is critical information.

“This data is captured in a CSV file or Excel file that you can read clearly, and will then align with that marked up P&ID with the addition of who extracted the data, when and whether there are any duplicate tags. This is something which is interesting for us because sometimes on vendor drawings the same tag numbers are used a number of times, which means it may need a little bit of contextualising and allows us to improve the parent tag and give a unique identifier so the data is clear.”

2. Categorise equipment correctly

“Once you’ve identified the equipment from the drawings or the data sheets, Effio™ allows you to assign the equipment type and categorise it effectively using coding techniques which are based on industry standards, such as ISO 14224 and KKS.

“Being able to categorise equipment in this way means you have a good variation of different types of equipment and can easily organise them into groups. For instance, you could group your pumps together, electrical motors, compressors, or instrumentation, all with their own separate coding set. We can then use that code and map each piece of equipment internally within Effio™.

“Although you can use any coding technique you prefer, we would recommend using an international standard of coding such as KKS or ISO 14224, as it makes it easier for organisation, comparing equipment across different plants, or ensuring your maintenance strategies are linked properly to your types of equipment. This is important as the equipment type is the driver for the equipment characteristics and enables you to hold the relevant technical data within your system.

“A good example for using characteristics for equipment types are Valves. One of the main things when it comes to the practical application of changing out valves is the face to face measurement of the flanges. It’s something that you can capture on your CMMS so that when you’re ordering the right type and spec of valve, you know the valve will also physically fit. The equipment type also drives criticality rules, and we can use that to help build your rules in there to make a better and more consistent allocation of criticality, and also your maintenance strategy.”

3. Build and deploy an effective location hierarchy

“Another key feature of Effio™ is that it allows you to build an effective and functional location hierarchy, which is crucial to the success of your maintenance management regime.

“To do this, you want to move into the asset register and actually start building and constructing it to have parent-child relationships, which involves grouping information into systems and then equipment, before breaking each piece of equipment down further into its individual parts and equipment type.

“At this stage you want to think about the equipment’s main function and sub function – what is the task that a certain piece of equipment and its auxiliary equipment is carrying out? When it comes to sub functions, it’s all about whether the equipment is controlling or isolating something, so this could involve monitoring, then shutdown, pressure relief and manual shut off, for example.

“Making use of these drop down menus, as well as having a really obvious and clear description of each piece of equipment and what it’s doing, allows people in your team to locate it easily and makes it easier to spot errors if the data is consistent – a consistent error is easy to fix, but an inconsistent error is much more difficult. It’s also important to have this clear context on what the equipment piece is actually doing for any legislative requirements, based on its function or sub function.

“One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned over the years, and what Effio™ facilitates in its design, is to work methodically and accurately through these steps, completing them in the right order. For instance, you want to make sure that the equipment identification is fully closed out before you start allocating criticality to it, as this will prevent any problems and rework later once you start assigning maintenance.

“Effio™makes sure the gap between each step is as short as possible, while enabling you to clearly identify where there’s work in progress or not started yet, before carrying out quality assurance checks and having sign-off from the client, all within this one tool. It takes the data build aspect and the workshop requirements into one online forum, so you’re not having to step out with this single tool to look at any data sheets or workbooks. Instead, you’re giving people access to the data in one place.

“This means that when it comes to load your CMMS, you can already see how everything interacts, you understand the quality of what you have, with any questions that are outstanding highlighted in the comments section. It’s very simple, very straightforward, and allows you to simply view or change information within the hierarchy.”

4. Efficiently assign criticality scores

“To determine optimal levels of maintenance, Effio™ allows you to unlock efficiencies in what is a crucial but often time-consuming process.

“In terms of criticality, you always want to start with your matrix. Whether you have a 5 by 5, 6 by 6 or even an 8 by 8 matrix, you can incorporate it into Effio™. This way of thinking about probability and likelihood gives you that ability to understand the risk, and easily see if you are under massive implications if failing was to happen, so you can have something in place to mitigate against this.

“Once you’ve allocated these things, you want to be able to say, based on the whole of the hierarchy, what allocations you have had. This is where your location hierarchy and grouping equipment into the functionalities and sub functions comes in handy, as you start seeing which pieces of equipment could be categorised based on their criticality level. Things like pressure relief and shutdown are ones you would expect to be marked as high, whereas pressure relief could be marked as medium if there aren’t hazardous chemicals involved.

“As you start to refine these functions and subfunctions in this way, you start to understand why they are marked under a certain criticality level based on their function and the context in which they are used. What you can then do is clearly show what your criticality levels look like and the distribution across low, medium and high, or from a scale of 1-5.

“Effio™ also allows you to assign criticality rules, where you can quickly assign criticality levels based on whether there are pressure safety valves, or hazardous materials, for instance, and review these over the four main areas of safety, environment, production and business, as well as any others you may wish to add.”

“Overall Effio™ allows you to capture the critical thinking that has gone into the rules that are applied to equipment criticality and also any exception rules that need to be recorded and applied.”

5. Deploy and optimise your maintenance management regime

“Once you have your asset register established, you know the equipment and what it’s doing, the criticality of it, as well as how important it is to the business, you can then allocate maintenance easily based on all this information which you now have clear visibility of. Effio™ gives you a place to store your maintenance strategies, rather than keeping them in someone’s bottom drawer or on the shelf somewhere, where application or reference to them will be very difficult.

“ABL has built and delivered strategies and maintenance tasks for various different clients across everything from drilling, to mining, to production and offloading of storage units and land-based chemical plants, so we have a wide range of basic strategies in our library. There’s a lot of things that you can refine and add to but really it’s on a case by case basis – we would recommend having the basics first so you’re establishing a clear starting point. From our experience more than 80% of equipment on site can be covered by generic maintenance and the remaining 20% can be looked at more attention and specificity.”

“If you have your own library of maintenance strategies, we can easily incorporate that within Effio™ while filling some gaps that you may have. It’s about finding the sweet spot between over maintaining and under maintaining, which will change throughout the asset’s life. As the asset gets older, it will potentially require more maintenance, and you may decide the replacement costs are less than the cost to keep looking after it.

“You want to capture enough information so that you understand what you’re looking to do. For example, you want to know the frequency of maintenance required, the type of maintenance, the job description, what is contained within that job plan or the task. The data then is in a position where we can look to see whether it’s online, whether it’s a PM approach or condition monitoring approach, for instance, what are the offline and online durations, the hours, the type of resources.

“To optimise performance and unlock opportunities, Effio™ reporting function provides you with a dashboard of different tag frequencies, maintenance allocation, the criticalities of tags and more, based on live data that has been taken from the software itself. It allows you to understand what’s going on with your maintenance and saves time preparing reports and pulling data from a number of different sources.

“It’s very much a clear and collaborative work environment, which is what we’ve always found is what yields the best results. It also allows you to see where there is data missing – and the quicker you know about data that is missing, the quicker you can rectify this.”