Sources of unplanned downtime can be many including equipment failures and human error. For downtime resulting from operator interactions, one major source of errors is the communications breakdown that sometimes happens during a shift change. If not told or seen in captured notes and observations, the incoming operators may lack visibility to the key tasks and priorities to keep the process operating in a stable manner.
Paper-based operator logbooks have a long history across the process industries, but have the same limitations that other paper-based systems have—difficulty in searching historical information, trends, and situational expertise. The recorded information may also be illegible and disorganized.
One way to address shift handover risk is to incorporate electronic logbooks to capture events, observations, notes and tasks in a fully searchable environment. Logbooks is a web application used to capture electronic records of operator activity as well as plan and track operator tasks during a shift.
Mary describes some challenges with operators at shift change knowing which tasks to finish and which tasks to start. Logbooks provides a shift handover dashboard which provides a real-time overview of the activities going on with the current shift. Each part of the overview is clickable for operators to be able to access more detailed information through classification, status, or user configurable filters. Access to past shift summaries is also readily accessible.
A second view provides all the operator entries that have taken place over the course of the shift. Search is available for simple or extensive searches to identify similar situations that may have occurred in the past. Log entries can be performed in several ways. Unstructured entries are simple text that are classified into common areas such as operator rounds and/or associated with a piece of equipment to help with future searches. A structure entry is one selected from a list of templates where entry information is inserted into a list of pre-defined fields. An example of a structured entry is a daily inspection of the fire and gas safety system.
Mary closed by noting how this structured way of communications exchange between shift operators and the knowledge base of fully-searchable information built over time help reduce the risk of unplanned downtime and sub optimal performance.
You can connect and interact with other operations management experts in the Operations Management group in the Emerson Exchange 365 community.
