Asset information handover and CFIHOS
Asset information handover is a major headache for owner/operators (O/O) across capital-intensive industries. I’ve written about the impact of poor asset information handover in a previous blog, linked here. In short, there are many areas impacted by inefficient business processes associated with handover. These include financial and regulatory impacts as well as labor productivity and equipment availability impacts. Streamlining and automating your information handover business processes is critical if plant & facility owner/operators want to compete in today’s rapidly changing market. We are reminded of this in a quote from former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates:
“The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competitors, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose.”
Bill Gates – Business @ the Speed of Thought
So, how do standards help with the challenge of handover? Standards are needed when a contractor, such as an engineering procurement and construction firm (EPC), hands over a new system or facility to an owner/operator who requires all the relevant information for operations. Without a standard, the contractor often delivers the information in application-specific formats, requiring the owner/operator to utilize multiple software environments to access the data and thereby preventing effective data re-use by supply chain managers, maintenance crews, etc.
The Capital Facilities Information Handover Specification (CFIHOS – pronounced “see-fos”) is a popular standard used for information handover consistency, meant for operators, contractors, equipment manufacturers, and suppliers. The use of this standard is meant to reduce inefficiencies and costs in the information supply chain. This is accomplished by standardizing terminology and deliverables as well as through the use of a common reference data library used to manage asset-related information and related documentation. A common standard such as CFIHOS is a giant leap forward for many operators who receive a vast amount of documents from their project suppliers. The documents & data need to be extracted, transformed, validated and entered into operational systems of record such as the ERP system and maintenance system (CMMS / EAM).
With our Capital Asset Lifecycle Management solution, based on Teamcenter software, you can automate many of these handover processes and align the data according to your company standards or to an industry-standard such as CFIHOS. The solution acts as an engineering system of record from which supplier information can be effectively managed, then passed to core operational systems through integration. This data flow ensures that the as-built and as-maintained views of the facility are accurately represented and change is seamlessly managed through a streamlined business process. In the video below, you can see an example of how this information would be consumed downstream in the maintenance system (or on a mobile device with our field maintenance solutions). The plant data can be viewed through multiple CFIHOS schemes where operator crews can view the maintenance scheme and the corrosion loop scheme in order to perform a risk-based inspection analysis.
Want to learn more about how we support the CFIHOS standard with our Capital Asset Lifecycle Management solution? Click the link here to download our latest infographic on the topic or visit us on the web.
