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.
 

A distinguishing feature of Hamburg's approach is the use of a single format to store the main content of each e-record managed by the system. This is currently the TIF format. Through the use of the Hyper.Net® PDF/A Compliance Automator, the Hyper.Net® Workload Manager and Hyper.Net Web Services, the city has been able to ensure the long-term readability of content by eliminating the use of proprietary file formats going forward. For this reason, documents in the HIM workflow are now converted after each modification into PDF renditions that are attached back into the corresponding e-record. When a workflow process has been completed, all documents associated with the workflow and the workflow's audit trail itself are date stamped and comverted into a single compound PDF/A file and transferred to the e-record storage area on the tamper-proof EMC Centera information archive.

Throughout the various Hamburg departments and agencies, the HIM workflow—implemented on the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 platform—support mores than 10,000 regular users and automates approximately 4,5 million workflow tasks and the conversion of over 40 million pages per year (and correspondingly more when accounting for documents that are subsequently modified).

All of this digital content still needs to be preserved whether it is considered as traditional ERM content or what some may consider 'peripheral' content from a social media environment. Like with email, it's the content that is important and not the container or location of the content. There are many standards available to help you and your organization to properly preserve your digital information. Standards is not a bad word but is a document that you can place your trust in because they are developed by groups of experts who make decisions as to the appropriate requirements to be included in the standard. They are documents that are established by consensus and approved by recognized bodies that have rigorous approval processes and provide common and repeatable rules, guidelines or characteristics.

Standards are made available so that you do not need to recreate the wheel, if there is a standard, it is best to use it. There are more important things to be done than to reinvent processes.

The following are a few of the standards you should be aware of that will help you to preserve information:

•  ISO 14721, Space data and information transfer systems – Open archival information systems – Reference model (OAIS) which is a digital standard freely available on the web and as an ISO standard. It presents a set of theoretical models that represent many aspects of digital preservation from representation of information through metadata to functions and processes that are needed in digital preservation.
•  ISO 15489, Information and documentation – Records management is a two part standard often referred to as the "Records Management Bible" that standardizes the best practices for records management. It uses an Australian Standard, AS4390 as its basis to provide guidance on managing records of original documents.
•  ISO/TR 18492, Long-term preservation of electronic document-based information provides practical methodological guidance for the long-term preservation and retrieval of authentic electronic document based information taking into consideration the role of technology neutral information technology standards that support long-term access to information.
•  ISO 19005, Document management – Electronic document file format for long-term preservation which is a three part standard specifying a file format based on PDF, Portable Document Format, that is technology neutral. Two of the three parts have been published. The third part that will be published soon will allow for files to be embedded in the PDF/A file without the file losing its archival nature.  This means you will be able to store the native file or XML within the PDF/A file.

These are just a fraction of the standards available to help you with your digital preservation. Each of them will help your organization to preserve your digital history by ensuring a better success rate with digital preservation and will help to reduce your risks because of the best practices they offer.

Instead of a Night at the Museum, I wonder what it would be like at a Night at the Digital Archives. Imagine all the bits and bytes coming to life and surrounding you. It may be more of a nightmare unless we embrace and use some of the industry standards that are available!

For more information about standards, http://www.aiim.org/standards.