Back in the days when maintenance records were tracked on paper, the US Navy had an elaborate system of checks, balances, and audits to ensure readiness of all the ships’ equipment. Antech developed a better way to schedule periodic maintenance by digital storage and automated scheduling of maintenance procedures. Now the resulting software is deployed to every ship in the Fleet. The optimizations have reduced manpower requirements while increasing the reliability of the schedules to the point that audits have been eliminated.
Scheduling/ Tracking Assets
Antech conceived and created NAVSEA’s standard planned maintenance scheduling software, SKED, to keep their systems and equipment in top condition. The software reads maintenance procedures, and produces annual, quarterly, monthly, and daily schedule views instantly. The SKED algorithms take into account the relationships between maintenance items, as well as the tools, parts and materials required to get the work done. So maintainers can pull an engine when they have all the materials to do the work and can minimize downtime. The software even takes into account events that impact schedules such as when the ship is in port or at sea. The result? Maintenance shops run smoother, and maintainers work smarter.
Interested in an enterprise scheduling solution like SKED for your company? We have a commercial product called Gusto that may be right for you. Give us a call and ask for a Gusto representative.
Process Automation
If improved scheduling answers the “when” questions, what about the “how?” Writing good maintenance procedures is the purview of engineering, but good procedures don’t work if they aren’t accessible. This is where our performance support experience comes in: getting the right information where it’s needed, when it’s needed. Like the Navy’s schedules, planned maintenance procedures used to be designed for paper and technicians developed certain expectations for how information was presented. Antech has driven changes from the old, page-based formats to smart—yet familiar—technical documentation delivered electronically and presented on computers.
Our analysis services are geared toward understanding how information is used, then architecting a process that feeds all the information to the right formats from a single, authoritative source. We revolutionized the distribution of the Navy’s planned maintenance procedures by establishing a content management solution, exporting the procedures to XML, and using the common source to support automated bulk printing as well as computer-based display in a custom view (both within and outside of our SKED software). Build once, use many times! We can do the same for you.
Personalization
One advantage of having your content in electronic format, and particularly using intelligent markup schemes in XML, is the ability to customize it for users. This is a new concept in maintenance management, because maintenance information is very dependent on configurations. In other words, everyone’s situation is different, so how does an author anticipate what set of procedures you need today? On paper, the shop manual that a mechanic uses to fix your car contains information about options that you don’t have on your car – like that automatic lane change warning system that wakes you up and brews you a cup of coffee if you fall asleep at the wheel. But in electronic form, that manual could be delivered to you so that it only addresses the options you chose. Wouldn’t that be great?
To accomplish this in real life, there are many information sources that have to be reconciled. But that is exactly what we are doing with the Navy’s maintenance procedures. In the future, maintenance schedules and procedures will be delivered to each ship with only the information they need, eliminating a costly and time consuming customization process that is repeated with each new data set. If you have information that needs to be customized, we can make that happen.
