Digitize Your Work Process to Reduce Cost at Your Facility

Decision makers across all industries are being asked to reduce cost while maintaining safe and reliable operations. While it can be difficult for facility leaders to easily identify areas to reduce their budget and resources without impacting the long-term value of their programs, there are a variety of cost reduction opportunities available.

One opportunity that facilities have to reduce cost without affecting their reliability is digitizing their current work processes. Digitizing all workflow processes or simply digitizing specific areas of a program can help a facility save a significant amount of money and time.

For example, an average facility wastes at least 10% of their budget on administrative tasks during the preparation of upcoming program activities. Digitizing these tasks can help facilities optimize their budget by focusing the resources dedicated to completing these tasks on other activities within the program.

In addition to optimizing administrative tasks, facilities can reduce cost by digitizing work processes in these four major areas:

• Digitize current work procedures by leveraging business intelligence tools to create dashboards that visualize important data such as historical and forecasted spend, forecasted risk, and availability and downtime metrics
• Digitize and electronically categorize drawings such as Piping & Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs), Process Flow Diagrams (PFDs), and isometrics to give end users the ability to quickly search for asset information across multiple documents
• Digitize field execution reporting and pair digitized reports with a mobile software tool that allows real-time inspection readings to be instantly synced with the program’s Inspection Data Management System (IDMS)
• Digitize current task reporting to quickly align the program’s upcoming and completed tasks

Once facilities identify the processes they would like to digitize, they can leverage business intelligence tools such as PowerBI or Tableau to create on-demand Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dashboards for their current work processes. Creating these dashboards in tandem with digitizing asset documentation such as P&IDs and Corrosion Model Diagrams (CMDs) will help facilities quickly assess the information they need to evaluate how their program is performing.

Figure 1 is an example of an electronically circuitized P&ID for a piping program. Digitized P&IDs allows users to quickly search for any element located within the P&ID, and can be linked to isometric drawings. While this step may seem simple, digitizing these types of documents will allow your inspection department to have better insight into your program.

Figure 2 is an example of a CMD for a crude unit. Digitized CMDs can be linked to P&IDs, providing better insight into the unit’s damage mechanisms and corrosion loops. Additionally, users can pull all of the corresponding drawings for the corrosion loops. 

Digitizing work processes will ensure facility leaders make strategic decisions based on accurate, updated data. For additional resources and information on how your facility may be able to reduce cost by digitizing your existing work process, watch the full session recording or join the Weekly Cost Savings Series at pinnacleart.com.