Across the asset lifecycle, engineering information accumulates in drawings, maintenance records and operational systems. The challenge is connecting those records so teams can establish what is current, how it relates to the equipment and what it means for the work ahead.
Most industrial organisations have spent decades creating engineering information. Every project, modification, shutdown and maintenance activity leaves behind drawings, work orders, specifications, manuals and operational records. Together, they form an extensive body of engineering knowledge that continues to support the asset long after the original work has been completed.
It is tempting, then, to assume that when operational challenges arise, it is because information is missing. In practice, that is rarely the case. More often, the information already exists, but it exists in different systems, owned by different disciplines and organised for different purposes. The maintenance system manages work orders. The historian records operational data. Engineering documentation is managed elsewhere, while asset registers, vendor documentation and operational procedures all follow their own structures. Each system performs its own role well. The difficulty begins when someone needs to understand how those individual pieces relate to the same physical asset.
Much of the time, this remains largely invisible. Engineers and maintenance teams have developed ways of working around fragmented information for years. They know where to search, which systems contain the most reliable records and how information created at different moments in an asset’s life fits together. Connecting information becomes part of the job, even though it rarely appears in project plans or maintenance schedules.
The Records Existed. Connecting Them Took Three Weeks.
The impact becomes far more visible when organisations need answers quickly, as one recent example made clear. A production facility had experienced a catastrophic transformer failure. Although there were fortunately no injuries, the subsequent investigation required engineering drawings, work orders, vendor documentation, certificates and operational records before the facility could resume normal operations. None of this information had been lost. It already existed within the organisation. The challenge was assembling it into a complete and reliable information package. That process took three weeks, after which a reference to a newer document revision still had to be located before the investigation could proceed.
What made this situation noteworthy was not the failure itself, but the difference between storing information and understanding an asset. Every required document already existed, yet understanding how those documents related to one another, and confirming that nothing had been overlooked, proved considerably more difficult. The asset had recently changed hands, and much of the institutional memory had moved on with it. The information remained, but the understanding of how it fitted together did not. That is the quiet cost of fragmentation: it remains hidden until an unexpected event forces an organisation to see the whole asset at once.
Understanding an Asset Requires More Than One System
The same pattern appears during routine engineering activities, although usually on a smaller scale. Consider a single temperature transmitter. Its manufacturer’s manual may be stored in the document management system, while the maintenance platform holds the functional location, equipment number and work order history. Operational values are visible through the historian, alarm settings are managed elsewhere, and engineering drawings show where the instrument fits within the wider process. In some organisations, the same instrument may even be identified differently depending on which system someone is using. None of these systems contains incorrect information. Each accurately describes one aspect of the equipment. Understanding the asset, however, requires those individual descriptions to be brought together before a complete picture emerges.
Why Engineering Information Needs Context
This distinction becomes increasingly important as industrial assets evolve. Projects introduce new equipment, modifications change existing installations, and maintenance activities generate additional operational history. At the same time, organisations replace legacy applications and introduce specialised systems to support new business requirements. Each decision makes sense in isolation, but over time the information landscape becomes more fragmented, even as the volume of engineering information continues to grow.
As a result, engineers can spend considerable time gathering and checking information before the engineering work begins. Before a modification can be assessed, an inspection planned or an operational issue investigated, information from multiple sources must first be gathered, compared and validated. The engineering work itself may only begin once confidence has been established that everyone is working from the same understanding of the asset.
These questions are rarely abstract. An engineer preparing a modification needs to know whether a valve has already been changed. An operator needs confidence that the correct pressure limit is being used. A maintenance planner needs to know whether an issue has already been resolved. In each case, the answer almost always exists somewhere within the organisation’s systems. What consumes the time is not finding it, but establishing that it can be trusted and that it belongs with everything else describing the same asset.
AI Faces the Same Challenge
Artificial intelligence illustrates the same challenge. Before AI can answer an engineering question, it first needs to understand which engineering documents, work orders, operational data and asset information describe the same physical asset. Like every engineer, it depends on engineering context.
Connecting Information, Not Replacing Systems
One practical approach is to connect information across existing systems, so teams can see which documents, maintenance records and operational data relate to the same asset. The objective is not to duplicate information or create yet another repository. It is to preserve the relationships between documents, assets, maintenance activities and operational information, so that people no longer need to reconstruct that understanding every time a decision has to be made.
Unexpected events will always occur. Equipment will fail, projects will introduce change and investigations will demand answers. The organisations that respond most effectively are rarely those with the greatest volume of engineering information. More often, they are the organisations that have made it possible to understand how that information fits together before decisions need to be made. Understanding the asset is what ultimately allows organisations to operate it with confidence.
Continue the conversation
Understanding an asset starts with understanding how engineering information connects across your organisation. If you’d like to explore that conversation further, we’re here to help.
About the author
Tjidde Boers is Global Industry Principal at Assai, working with asset-intensive industries across energy, chemicals, and nuclear to connect engineering information to operational reality.
He has spent more than 3 decades in the field with customers across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and writes from direct experience of what works and what doesn’t. He can be reached at [email protected] or found on LinkedIn.