Improving inspection strategies

The following is a user story from an Iron Ore Mine in Western Australia, the customer shares, in their words what they believe are the benefits they have experienced by implementing PDS Inspect as part of their maintenance strategy onsite.

A before and after look at the benefits of implementing PDS Inspect

Before the implementation of PDS Inspect for Pulley Lagging Inspections, during shutdowns we would photograph every pulley, tag the photo with the pulley ID then return to office collate and convert photos then compile and issue a report.

Problems with our system:

It was a very time-consuming process to convert the photos ensuring the pulleys and photos were correctly tagged together.
Compiling the report took a significant amount of time.
Correct referencing of the faults found and then documenting them in the work management system, some issues could get missed.
Searching for historical trends meant manually going through every previous report for the asset data.

In the end, knew we must find a better system for inspection, reporting and reviewing historical data.

Now, our technicians use the iPDS app and the PDS web app. In the field, at the asset, the technician selects the asset, classifies the assets state based on its condition and photographs the asset. Upon returning to the office, the iPDS App is sync’d to the server and the report previewed and audited to ensure all faults are recorded into our Work Management System. Finally, the report is distributed and issues escalated where required.

Benefits we have seen since moving to PDS Inspect:

Live data available anytime / anywhere – at any time that we are out in the plant, if we find an issue we can confirm if the issue has been identified in iPDS, if not, we record it and escalate appropriately.
We have seen a data collection performance increase of approx. 30%. We no longer need to manually capture photos and tag against an asset.
We have seen approx. 70% speed increase in our reporting time, we no longer need to convert and catalogue photos and insert them into the report.
We can at any time, select an asset and see its current and historical records. No longer do we need to go and review all previous reports manually.
All detected faults are recorded into the Work Management System. Prior to issuing our report, we run the audit feature within the report to ensure all faults have the work management system references assigned.
In summary, PDS has enabled us to spend more time on the data analysis, rather than the collection and report generation processes.

Courtesy of T. McIntyre (mine site withheld)