Additionally, equipment and plant-related problems can lead to even bigger issues: heightened risk of environmental damages, increased legal and compliance costs, greater risk to maintenance workers’ safety, and brand deterioration. A company’s only defense is to ensure higher equipment reliability and a clear record of all maintenance activities, so they can proactively take action to prevent unplanned downtime that could affect their bottom line.

Plant maintenance and equipment failure analysis stretches across departments, divisions, regions, and even different organizations. You need to include all appropriate stakeholders, both within and outside of the organization, in collaborative processes that make it easy to track any information gathered along the way.

Collecting, storing, and retrieving all this data is critical to resolving an unplanned equipment failure. For example, vibration analysis, nondestructive testing results, and digital images should all be stored with the equipment data. This way, maintenance planners can more easily analyze relevant information to determine what improvements the regularly scheduled maintenance needs and improve maintenance frequency.

• Having plant maintenance hierarchy and associated content – such as images of failed components – available from a single interface can cause the epiphany moment that makes you change the required lubrication frequency of a machine, thus extending the component’s run life
• Accessing historical vibration analysis results allows you to replace a bearing before it fails, ensuring a shorter, planned outage rather than a lengthy, unplanned repair that might also cause collateral damage

A big-data strategy that integrates all relevant content with your plant operations means you can:

• Enhance internal and external collaboration around plant maintenance
• Improve equipment reliability
• Reduce outages and costs due to a simplified process for collecting, storing, and retrieving maintenance information
• Improve failure analysis and reporting
• Increase regulatory compliance and reduce legal exposure through better records management, traceability, and auditability

Let me first state, that PDF is not the ONLY file format available and won't be the ONLY file format that should be used for archiving, turning a revisable electronic documents into a ePaper documents or for exchanging documents. For now, it is available, accepted and is very robust. This robust nature was what prompted NPES and the Graphics Communications Industry along with Adobe Systems to develop what was the first of several specific focused PDF standards to satisfy the needs of prepress printing of advertisements (ISO 15930). From here, we developed variations for archiving (ISO 19005), engineering (ISO 24517), healthcare, universal accessibility (ISO 14289), variable data exchange (ISO 16612) and others. Each of these PDF subset standards was developed to satisfy a specific industry need.

The fact that many variations of the PDF standard were developed all based on the PDF Specification shows the versatility of the PDF specification. It is important to remember that even the PDF specification is now an open standard no longer controlled solely by Adobe Systems.  In 2007, Adobe Systems approached AIIM (www.aiim.org/standards ) requesting that AIIM help foster the PDF Specification through the ISO standardization process. On behalf of ANSI, the American National Standards Institute (www.ansi.org), AIIM did just that and ISO was able to publish the PDF specification as ISO 32000-1 in 2008. Yes, Adobe Systems is a player in the development of ISO 32000 and its subsequent versions but there are a host of other PDF developers at the table including Microsoft who along with NetCentric Technologies are the current project leaders for the work on ISO 32000-2.

The work on the PDF standards marches onward. With each part of the standard, the file format becomes even more feature rich and better. The ISO working groups will be meeting next week in Canada to focus their attention on the PDF standards as well as on other topics such as trusted repositories, quality issues, document management vocabulary and many other topics.

We should remember that PDF is here and available now.  Until an alternate file format is available, let's work together to make this one better. If there are problems with PDF or if there is something you wish PDF did that it does not do today, send your ideas to me at bfanning@aiim.org or post your ideas as comments to this blog post. I will take them forward to the appropriate PDF committee.

When an alternate file format becomes available, make sure you are making an intelligent decision as you decide to adopt it. Some of the factors you should consider when deciding to go to another file format are:

• Maturity of definition – Is it based on a beta or draft standard or is it based upon a published standard?
• Adoption – Have the solution providers developed products that support the standard? How many solutions support the standard? How many files have been created using the standard file format?
• Endurance – How long has the standard been available? Are there any implementations of the standard?
• Product standards vs infrastructure standards based – Is the standard developed for a limited number of products or limited to a specific operating system or is it technology neutral and able to be used by many products?

In addition to the above, you should also give consideration to the sustainability of the file format you choose. In another blog post, I will deal the characteristics of sustainable file formats.

While PDF may not be the perfect file format, it is what we currently have to work with. As we wait, remember that you have an opportunity to make the current file formats as good as they can be by making recommendations for improvements to the standards upon which the file formats are based.

For more information on standards, please visit http://www.aiim.org/standards.
 

If your organization is like most, you probably have between five and 20 applications that are content-related. Employees have to learn how to use multiple systems just to get one task done. IT staff has to dedicate time and resources to managing multiple systems—many of which have very similar functions—in multiple departments.

It’s a recipe for complexity, and it is just now—with the rise of composite content applications—starting to change.

Defining Composite Content Applications

Many organizations have begun implementing enterprise content management (ECM) as integrative middleware that enables content-related applications to work together to drive business processes. Composite content applications (CCA) are the physical manifestation of this strategy.

Gartner defines a composite application as “an abstraction layer on top of a service repository, which orchestrates a new business process and has its own user interface.”

My colleague Kimberly Samuelson likes to say that CCAs are cross-functional process solutions assembled from prebuilt components. For example:

• CRM + eForms + ECM + BPM = client onboarding CCA

In other words, the unified whole is greater than—and different from—the sum of its parts.

CCAs and ECM

Where an integration typically links two different software applications together to act as a coordinated whole, a CCA involves linking three or more systems in service of a specific business process, such as:

• Invoice processing
• Purchase order management
• Contract management
• Correspondence support
• HR onboarding
• Sales order and material processing
• Case management
• Claims processing
• Benefits enrollment

CCAs are generally built on top of an ECM system because they automate complex processes that previously required staff to manually sort through paper documents and other forms of content such as green screen case records, e-mail correspondence, etc.

Currently, although 27.4% of documents are used to either initiate or drive a business process, only 28% of organizations capture their documents at the beginning of the process. The earlier you capture a document, the better the ROI, so using ECM as a foundational element of a CCA is important. By doing so, you gain benefits including:

• Shorter cycle times.
• Fewer errors.
• Improved compliance and auditability.
• Better visibility into the business process.

Get More Out of What You’ve Already Got

CCAs are attractive because they allow organizations to create new and innovative solutions using existing technology investments. According to Brent Burns, Founder of Asset Dedication, LLC, “We wanted to keep our fees low enough that we’d be extremely competitive. Technology was the way to get more done with a smaller headcount.”

He explains that Asset Dedication has created a CCA to automate the account opening process while streamlining compliance procedures by integrating BondDesk’s inventory and trade management system with Asset Dedication’s portfolio management, customer relationship management (CRM) and ECM systems.

Burns says, “Once someone signs onto the system, they can do everything they need to without leaving the program they’re using. I don’t want people having to learn 20 systems—I want that single sign-on; I want it to be that fast.”

CCAs allow access to multiple data sources and foster the merging of real-time and legacy data into a single interface in order to simplify a complex business process. When you build a CCA, you are extending and evolving your existing IT assets in order to extract more value from what you already have.

Back in February 2011, Peter Schooff of eBizQ.net asked a very important question, “How big is a process?” The very insightful comments that answer the question bring forth many interesting perspectives on the size of a process. Ranging from the length of a string to single “value chain” process, the debate is very enlightening.

However, outside these very pertinent arguments, I strongly believe the size of a process is all about management capacity. A “process” must be measureable and manageable. And it is best managed under a single process owner, ideally a CxO, allowing clear decision making to govern the process.

Many a time, in a desire to have an end-to-end view, organizations tend to meander towards large, complicated and sometimes complex processes. Cutting across the authority lines among different CxO’s, the process tends to become a broth with many cooks. I guess we all know what happens when many cooks come together for a single broth.

This also means that apart from the process diagram, no human element is able to comprehend or re-collect the process. It also results in loss of memory of the reasons the process has taken to become the maze it has turned out to be. At a time of change, intensive efforts are required to evaluate the process and more often than not this leads to process-fatigue.

So what is Management Capacity?

Management Capacity is the capacity, within which a CxO sets strategies, ensures execution, monitors performance and achieves objectives under the boundaries set by the demands of their function and corporate governance.

Obviously, to attain this we need to achieve the below:

1. Each process must be manageable under a Single CxO Process Owner
2. Each Process and its sub-processes must link to Enterprise KPIs under the respective CxO

In cases, where it is identified that a process spreads across more than one CxO, it is best to break it down and the process architecture changed to meet the above. The same principle applies when you go down to department level under a CxO.

An intangible element that also plays a key role is the CxO’s capability and ability to manage well. But, as we all know, good management is a pre-requisite to any good process to perform well.

So, if you want to get your processes performing, ensure they are defined and assigned under the right authority with the capacity to manage them.

This post was originally published in The Information Manager