Our team regularly work on complex engineering projects. And, whilst they're all interesting, this one stands out. One of our long term clients, PFML, has been using our web-service provision for approximately 20 years, delivering maintenance recommendations to their many clients and associated facilities.
The service we provided for this purpose was designed to comply with the requirements of ISO 14227, which provides a taxonomically structured approach to the system architecture of engineering facilities. Making use of "user-roles", and coupling this with the basic architecture of the system has resulted in a SAAS that is the perfect match for type of service being delivered by PFML.
Field operators and associated management / supervisory teams are interested in keeping things running smoothly. Identifying breakdowns before they occur is therefore essential. This type of engineering work is highly specialised and relatively infrequent, making it unsustainable for facilities to support on a full time basis.
Hence companies utilise remote, specialist engineering consultancies to provide this service - Consultancies who, themselves, must support several clients, to be viable.
In these cases, local operators are charged with collecting condition data from selected key machines, to pass onto the consultants, on a regular programme basis. The consultants analyse the data and provide a machine condition report back to local staff. In the event that the condition data indicates a likely fault, the consultant will raise a fault recommendation, to address the subsequent impending failure.
Facility Managers are keen to ensure economic levels of production are reliably maintained, whilst minimising maintenance costs. Hence this condition based maintenance recommendation is such an attractive approach.
So, our system design requirements include;
- interfaces for Site Operators, Facility Managers and the Engineering Consultants.
- must not lose legacy data
- convert bespoke code to XPOR Workflows
- data stores
- fault classification
- fault management
- Auditable report logs
- Secure
A significant challenge was to maintain both the new and old systems working on remote facilities, all synchronising back to a host server.