Maintenance Management Systems

Maintenance Management is a time-consuming activity for large companies who have to keep track of a wide variety of maintenance activities on equipment situated at many sites and locations. Maintenance Management can be made much more efficient, with considerable cost savings, by using an automated Maintenance Management System.

This page describes just one of the many types of documentation project I have worked on. For details of my other projects, see my home page.

Documentation of MS-DOS Based Software

From 1991 until 1994 I worked on the documentation of a relational database, used for maintenance management purposes. I worked at home using my own equipment, with regular visits to the client's site, and produced a total of nine volumes of documentation. The application is divided into modules, and the manuals are as follows:

• Module 1 - The Knowledge Base. Defines the equipment at sites and locations, such as operating units and stock items, together with their manufacturers and vendors.
• Module 2 - Event Monitoring. Defines incidents in terms of events occurring on units, for example breakdown of machinery.
• Module 3 - Planning. Defines cycles of planned maintenance, so that whenever maintenance is due on any unit of equipment, a planned incident is triggered.
• Module 4 - Work Control. Defines the jobs that need to be done in response to an incident, and issues work orders. Tasks can be defined which create jobs automatically in response to commonly occurring incidents.
• Module 5 - Operating Statistics and Bugetary Control. Displays statistics on the availability of plant and the causes of downtime. Also accumulates job costs to appropriate accounts and produces budget summaries for pre-defined periods.
• Module 6 - Fault Analysis. Identifies the frequency of incidents occurring on all equipment units of a given design, and the faults associated with the incidents. Faults are ranked in order of frequency, so that key problem areas can be identified.
• Module 7 - Inventory. Maintains a stock system so that parts are always available for use on jobs, and requisitions for new stock are made automatically when stocks become low. The stock system can be optimised so that requisitions for new stock are made in quantities which minimise costs. Requisitions can be converted to purchase orders which are sent out to suppliers and subsequently matched with deliveries.
• User Guide. Describes the software installation on stand-alone systems and Novell networks, and the creation of databases, user accounts, and administrative super users.
• Report Writer. Creates formatted reports, including work orders and purchase orders.

I produced all the above documentation by working on pre-release versions of the software, discussing it with the client's staff and developing reference text and tutorial examples. I used Ventura Publisher to create a consistent style of documentation, and except for the first two modules, I produced the final PostScript output disks, sent them out to a printer, and then checked the proofs. The only thing I didn't work on was the front covers of the manuals.

Documentation of Windows Based Software

During 1996 and 1997 I worked on the documentation of a Windows based version of the maintenance management software that had already been produced in DOS. This was not just a straight conversion to Windows. The modules were re-structured to take into account the feedback and requirements of customers, and to make the product more appropriate for a graphical interface.

Instead of producing printed manuals, I produced Windows Help files, since these were cheaper to produce and increasingly popular with users. I produced both reference text and tutorials, and context-sensitive help for every screen and every cursor-accessible field.

I would be interested in any documentation projects on maintenance management systems or other related activities. Please get in touch with me if you have any enquiries.

Mike Gascoigne, Write_on
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