Digital Asset Tracking for Industrial Productivity

Industrial workers waste 11+ hours per week on data gathering tasks across disconnected paper and digital systems, reducing time for productive, revenue-generating activities.
At the Hinkley Point C nuclear site construction, digital asset tracking prevented £20,000 daily downtime costs by enabling instant reporting and rapid response to equipment defects.
NDC Certification Bureau achieved 60% reduction in audit time and doubled business volume by centralizing asset tracking and compliance documentation on a unified platform.

If you had to name the one place that requires strict management of assets and little tolerance for wasted productivity, nuclear power plants would likely be at the top of the list.

When you think about a nuclear reactor structure, you likely picture lots of machinery including turbines, pressure vessels and steam generators. Behind the vast amounts of machinery and equipment, there are countless intricacies that must work in sync to ensure safety and efficiency while the plant is running. Inputting the wrong code on a piece of equipment or delaying supply orders can have a profound ripple effect.

Now imagine having to manage the entire site using a mix of paper-based processes and digital tools. In this scenario, various functional teams rely on established processes and best practices to keep their part of the business functioning. This process works until it comes time to share data.

For example, a quarterly operations report may require a few employees to pull data from different teams across the organization. That data may be created and managed in a variety of formats including paper, ERP reports, spreadsheets and various apps. Gathering all this information to present a big picture status view on activities may not seem like a big ask until you realize how long it takes. A recent productivity survey found that these types of tasks are known as “gray work” and can eat up 11 hours or more each week of employee time. That time could be better spent on more productive, revenue-generating activities.

How digital transformation can elevate the risk of gray work

For industrial companies that are further along in their digital journey and have eliminated use of paper forms, they may not think the gray work issue applies to their business. However, when an organization has lots of disconnected digital tools, it can inadvertently create more data silos that decrease productivity.

Because the defective machine had an asset tag attached to it, by the morning the manager had already been notified and initiated the necessary repairs, practically eliminating downtime.

Consider a classic example of what happens when the maintenance team needs to fix a machine outage. They receive a call, email or text, track down the equipment service agreement online and either add the request to their long list of repairs or begin to address it while putting other projects on the back burner.

As they work on the machine, the maintenance team learns they are missing a critical engine part and need to involve procurement to start the ordering process. When asked why the repairs will take so long, the maintenance supervisor informs management that they are waiting for the part to be delivered and it could take days.

What started as a seemingly straightforward machine repair has now affected multiple teams, managers and potentially thousands of customers. And what’s more, it could have been avoided. By having full equipment insights readily available, potential issues can be identified before they cause delays or outages. For example, with performance on the machine flagging before it ceased working, the maintenance team could have automatically triggered a pre-emptive part replacement order based on the machine’s user manual.

NDC raises the bar for site safety and compliance

Manufacturers and energy providers are not the only ones struggling with an overload of information that can impact their ability to function. Outside auditors and compliance overseers, those responsible for ensuring the smooth operations of these businesses, must also mitigate gray work.

As a case in point, let's look at NDC Certification Bureau Ltd., an ISO certification, training, auditing and compliance consulting provider. NDC’s consultants relied on legacy systems, Excel spreadsheets and Dropbox cloud hosting to manage customer data, audits and compliance logs.

For example, on large jobsites where site managers are responsible for thousands of safety assets, all the assets need to be tracked and logged. For NDC, the forms related to this tracking and logging quickly pile up, making them difficult to manage and prepare clients for audits.

NDC’s industry expertise and success with streamlining processes led to them to build low-code commercial applications for advanced asset tracking using scannable QR codes along with safety and compliance documentation. By streamlining the capture of information for asset tracking, safety and compliance onto a centralized work management platform, NDC now has easier access to accurate data.

It was NDC’s asset tracking app that caught the attention of Balfour Beatty, a company that maintains complex structures such as power systems. Balfour Beatty saw the potential of using the NDC app at the Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor construction project.

The benefits of using NDC’s Asset Tag solution at Hinkley Point C

The Hinkley project, which started in 2017, spans more than 400 acres and is set to play a critical role in the UK’s energy strategy by providing reliable, low-carbon electricity to more than six million homes once it becomes operational in 2030.

This massive project requires the Hinkley construction team to operate three shifts a day, seven days a week to stay on track. One aspect of the project includes shift operators signing in on paper forms and conducting physical checks on the vehicles using paper checklists.

Balfour Beatty, using NDC’s Asset Tag solution, was able to take the Hinkley construction team’s form, digitize it and allow workers to include their own feedback right from the site. They also developed an app to streamline the reporting process.

The benefits were immediate and significant. For example, a night shift operator reported defective tracks on a machine. Previously, defective machinery could result in downtime costs of £20,000 per day with a two to three-week repair cycle.

However, since that machine had an asset tag attached to it, by the morning the manager had already been notified and initiated the necessary repairs, practically eliminating downtime. Additionally, by looking at the company’s ‘action tracker’ in the morning, the teams know what needs to be done, what is potentially falling behind and where maintenance needs to be completed before it impacts productivity.

As a result, NDC has reduced its audit time by 60%. They also doubled their business volume by streamlining and centralizing information.

Anthony Offredi is director of Quickbase, a low-code platform that allows non-technical developers to build, customize and connect secure cloud applications without compromising IT governance and control.