Industrial organisations have never had more information available to them.
By Tjidde Boers, Global Industry Principal, Assai
Engineering drawings are stored in dedicated systems. Maintenance records live elsewhere. Certificates, procedures, vendor manuals and inspection reports each have their own repositories, workflows and owners. Over the years, organisations become increasingly sophisticated in how they manage information.
Yet engineers still spend a surprising amount of time gathering information before they can make a decision.
I don’t think this is because information is missing. More often, it is because information is organised around systems, while people work around assets.
When something goes wrong, your data is either ready or it isn’t
Take something as simple as a safety valve. Its certificate may live in one system. The connection drawings in another. Inspection records somewhere else. Standard operating procedures may be stored separately again. Individually, all these systems work exactly as intended. Together, however, they tell an incomplete story.
The engineer looking at that safety valve is not interested in four systems. They want to understand one asset.
This is a pattern I see regularly. Industrial organisations are not struggling with a lack of information. They are struggling to connect information in ways that reflect how people actually work.
Engineering, maintenance, operations and projects all optimise for their own needs. New applications are introduced. Existing systems remain. Over time, information naturally fragments, while the asset itself remains a single physical reality.
For years, experience bridges the gap. People know where to look. They know which system contains the certificate and where to find the latest inspection report. They know who to call when something is unclear.
But as organisations grow, that becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. The challenge is therefore not simply making information available. It is helping people understand how information relates to the asset, to previous decisions and to the work they are trying to perform today.
The organisations that do this well are rarely the ones with the fewest systems.They are the organisations that make complexity manageable. They connect information without forcing everything into a single repository. They preserve context across systems and disciplines. And they help engineers spend less time gathering information and more time applying their expertise.
Because the asset itself is not organised around systems. It is a single physical reality.
And the organisations that recognise that are usually the ones that are best at connecting information to the work that matters.
Continue the conversation
Engineering information, operational readiness and industrial AI are challenges that look different in every organisation. If these topics resonate with your experience, we would be happy to share how other owner operators, EPCs and asset-intensive organisations are approaching similar challenges.
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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.