Infor today announced the success that Invenergy has seen with Infor Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Mobile. Invenergy, one of North America's largest privately-held renewable energy companies, decided to adopt more mobile enterprise asset management processes to help optimize and digitize turbine maintenance operations, and help streamline asset management with better, more up-to-date data. Infor EAM Mobile is designed to help organizations get maximum value from their EAM system by providing technicians with access to the system virtually any place and any time.
Like many asset management operations, Invenergy's maintenance checklists were paper-based when the team first began considering new technology options several years ago. Technicians at the organization would go out with paper checklists and fill out steps as they were completed—sometimes legibly, sometimes not. That paper had to be uploaded into EAM, and then stored in binders for physical record-keeping. Adopting Infor EAM Mobile provided a way for the Invenergy teams to get that data out of binders and into a more easily reportable format.
After two beta tests, the company decided to move to fleet-wide implementation. Over a six-month period in 2016, the company extended its mobile platform across its North American operations, buying one AppleTM iPad for each maintenance crew. After a successful rollout, Invenergy decided it wanted to add even more efficiencies to the system and truly digitize its asset management operations by removing the paper from the system. Maintenance management was still based on "paper" copies, filed electronically in PDF form. The physical binders were gone, but key operational data still wasn't reportable, which meant the company still wasn't using its own front-line experience to track trends, identify and solve maintenance hot spots, and optimize deployment of personnel and resources.
"All of those capabilities make EAM Mobile a powerful tool that can be expanded into other applications," said Frank Santiago, Operations Support Manager, Invenergy. "With EAM, we're putting the work orders at the technicians' fingertips, literally and figuratively."
Invenergy then introduced mobile checklists in a format that was comfortable and recognizable for technicians. Mobile devices gave teams prompt access to central data, and a record of work is stored when it is finished. The searchable, end-to-end system can be particularly useful for a consolidated operation with multiple units—in this case, up to several hundred wind turbines on a single site—where periodic changes in ownership or share structure can produce sudden calls for complete maintenance records on one or several specific components.
"Being able to keep critical maintenance and asset data complete and up-to-date at all times is incredibly important to the health of a business," said Kevin Price, Infor EAM Technical Product Evangelist, Infor. "By extending the power of Infor EAM to the field, organizations can help empower mobile workers to record as they work, provide the ability to automate work order tasks and requests for labor, and can help improve response times and avoid unnecessary travel."