Hello. My name is SAM.
I am like the 1000's of Valves you own and operate every day.
For AI to be able to help you improve your performance in Operations and Maintenance, for every piece of equipment like me that you own, operate and maintain you need to be able to answer basic questions like
Where am I? What am I?
There is a sustainable and cost-effective way to ensure that you always have accurate and up-to-date information about what equipment you own and where it is. Just have your technicians take a few photos with their smartphones of each piece of equipment you own and operate after they work on it. This includes taking photos of the:
If your technician has location services turned on in the camera on their smartphone, the GPS or map location of where the photo was taken will be embedded in the photo.
Using AI and our own offshore staff, we extract the information from the photos your technicians take to help you
We use the information we extract from your technicians' photos to crawl through manufacturer websites and other sources to find as much relevant documentation and specification information as possible and link that to the photos.
We then make available to your technical Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) the photos and the buffet of information they ask us to find for them. With the tedious work of gathering the documents and extracting the requested information completed, your SMEs need only verify that the correct related documents have been gathered and that the correct information, such as specifications and spare parts, have been extracted. We save them time by drawing a box around the place(s) in the documents where the information they have asked us to find is and then showing that document page onscreen so that the information you asked us to find can be quickly verified.
There are many reasons why so many companies like yours have poor or incomplete information about many of their assets in their business systems. The main reason is that your internal staff are the best people to do that work. Yet their primary task is to keep the business running and gathering data Just-In-Case you need it is not their focus. Because the staff that operate and maintain your facilities do not have the time for the tedious work of finding and preparing information about the equipment you own and operate, companies have tried to create projects to fix the poor data issue once and for all or, even worse, outsource the data collection and verification. But this fails and fails repeatedly almost every time. The problem is that the minute the project ends, the data quality degrades, and an ongoing workable and sustainable process is rarely implemented.
Instead, we suggest using the same day-to-day, day-in-day-out process to gather your data and set a reasonable timeframe (3 years) to get it all done. The same process that you and your staff use to gather the complete set of data you need to improve business performance is the same process that you will use to keep that data reliable, trusted and up-to-date. The key is to make the information being gathered accessible and useful to your plant and field technicians as quickly as they gather it. There needs to be a Whats-In-It-For-Me component for the people doing the gathering, to get the engagement now and in the future.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how the data being gathered gets vetted and makes its way into your business system, let’s have you go through the steps your plant, mine, or field technician would take to collect the photos of any equipment they have performed corrective maintenance on.
To experience how simple this will be, please follow these steps:
When you send the first photo, we automatically create a webpage where you can view all the photos you send to us from your smartphone as thumbnails on a single webpage. The URL to that web page will be https://demo.strategicalignment.com/{your 10-digit mobile phone number}.html.
However, the photos you send to our servers are secure, as they are only accessible by you. Anytime you or anyone else accesses that webpage, the mobile phone number from which you sent the photos will be sent a 4-digit code that must be provided to proceed to the web page with your photos. This ensures that no one has access to your photos (just as it will be for your field technicians). Only the person who took the photos would have the phone that receives the 4-digit codes. Understand that the codes being received are like 2FA authentication and are only active for a few minutes.
To expedite the process of seeing the photos you have taken in this demo, in the reply message that you receive whenever you take a photo, along with the 4-digit code sent to your phone number, you will also receive a link that has the code embedded so that you can view the photos from a browser on your smartphone, without also having to type in the code so that:
Once you are verified, you will screen with two buttons [Upload Document] and [View Documents], both will be active. Let’s start by pressing the [View Documents] button. You should now see any and all the photos you have taken.
A left mouse click on any photos will bring up a full-screen view. In full-screen view, you can pan with a <Left> <Mouse> <Down> <Hold and & Drag>, and you can zoom in and zoom out with your mouse wheel. Pressing the <ESC> key will return you to the thumbnail view.
For documents other than photos that you have uploaded to your website using the Upload button (or that our AI and/or our staff have located and added for you), a thumbnail displays the first page of a PDF or Word document or a picture of a number of the top left cells of the first tab of an Excel spreadsheet. When you select those thumbnails, another tab will open on your browser, and you can navigate the document with whatever capabilities the browser provides.
The features that you have in this demo version, starting from the bottom right corner and going clockwise are:
If you see this icon in the bottom right corner of any of your photos, it means that you have location services turned on (a good thing). It indicates that the place on the surface of the earth where the photo was taken was embedded in the photo. Pressing this button will bring up a Google Maps display showing you where the photo was taken. Note that some phones, such as Samsung, scramble the GPS coordinates in GeoCoded photos when they are sent as an SMS message. Some phones refuse to send that Location information altogether. Know that if location services for the camera was active when the photo was taken, the accurate information about where the photo was taken is in the photo you took that is in your gallery. Once we are past the demo stage and into the pilot stage, understand when your field technicians send photos of any of your operating assets, we have the means to ensure that the accurate GPS location information is transferred to us as well, and will correct it in the photo we securely store for you.
Once
the photo is then removed from our servers. However, if we are asked to continue hosting the photos, arrangements can be made to do this on your behalf on an ongoing basis.
Moving to the bottom left corner, there is a toggle button with this 'treasure chest' icon. Pressing this button will toggle the button from a Blank & White graphic to a Colored Graphic. The result will be that when you refresh this page now or reopen your webpage later, the photo you have archived will be removed from your active view and placed into a 30-day archive state, at which point it will be automatically deleted. A separate web page will be provided that only the person who took the photo(s) will have access to, so it is possible to return the archived photo to their active page.
Next, above the Archive icon. the 'Retake Photo' toggle button is a way to indicate that the photo that was taken of a nameplate was too fuzzy or otherwise unreadable and perhaps to indicate that the wrong photo was taken of equipment altogether. Pressing this button will toggle the button from a Blank & White graphic to a Colored Graphic. In field operations, seeing this button active or coloured would remind a maintenance planner to add a task to any upcoming work order for that asset to add a task for the field technician to take a photo and what to take a photo of.
In the top left corner of every photo is a download button. This button is mainly for use when this page is accessed using a browser on a desktop or laptop, as the photo (unless deleted) will already be on the phone that was used to take the photo. Pressing this button will download the file associated with this thumbnail into the downloads folder on your local device. But again, to get access to the page where the photo and the button are displayed, a verification code would have been sent to the phone that took the photo, before access to see the photo and download to the local PC is granted.
This feature aims to select multiple photos and/or documents by toggling the Email Send button in the top right corner of any photo or document on this page to active.
You can toggle as many of these buttons on the page to active as you like. When one or more of these buttons are active on your webpage, the button in the top left corner of ALL the thumbnails that have been selected will change from a Download Button to a Send Button. Then, when you press what has turned into a [Send Email] in the top left corner of any thumbnail, the following will happen:
so that the person receiving the email you have modified understands why you are sending them the email. This is one of the WIIFM benefits for a field technician.
For example, a field technician could take some photos and then immediately send the photos to your internal SME or to a vendor or your warehouse person who can help them identify the parts to ship so that a piece of equipment can be repaired and brought back into service ASAP. About. to send the attachments to.
Unless and until you choose to email them to others, the photo(s) of equipment and any associated documents you have sent to our service (or those additional documents you allow our AI and offshore resources to find for you based on the photographed Make, Model, and Serial Number) can only be accessed by you now and in the future at
https://demo.strategicalignment.com/##########.html
Any time you open https://demo.strategicalignment.com/##########.html on your phone or your computer, you will receive a text message to this phone with a 4-digit code that you must enter to be able to see all the photos you have taken, plus any other drawings, specifications, or manuals you choose to upload (plus those our AI and offshore resources have found for you) that further detail the equipment you took the photo for.
If you haven't already done so, please go to
https://intro.strategicalignment.com
for the complete self-guided walkthrough. And feel free to share https://intro.strategicalignment.com with anyone in your company who would appreciate knowing about what we do.
We very much look forward to working with you in the future!
Strategic Alignment provides data-only solutions that leverage the smartphone and internet browser digital technologies you already own to gather information about all the assets and equipment you own and operate. We use expert offshore resources that we support with rapidly evolving AI technologies to prepare your equipment information so that it can be quickly validated by your technical equipment Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). Once they approve, we provide the data to you to hand to your IT department in the format they require to be loaded into your EAM. We look forward to sharing why this is the basis for being a top-quartile performer in your industry.
The problem is that the only people who can do this often tedious work are busy operating and maintaining your equipment and never have the time.
In primary industrial operations like yours, the cost of labour and materials to bring a failed piece of equipment back into production, for example, is, on average, 1/10th to 1/20th of the value of the production loss over the time the equipment was out of service. Achieving optimal financial results requires a complete understanding of what effect any business decision has on the bottom line. For example, knowing that maintenance cost is insignificant to loss of production can clarify the real consequence of lowering a maintenance budget. As is getting real about the ongoing financial cost of continuing to live with poor-quality asset information in your EAM.
In that light, your ROI on using our ongoing service to sustainably maintain top-quartile asset information in your EAM will be unique to your business operation. To help you become or continue to be a top-quartile performer in your industry, we look forward to working with you using the business information you provide to calculate the bottom-line value of always having trusted Asset information in your chosen EAM.
In industries like yours, once your plant and mine or field operations are constructed and in operation, your information and resources must move from Just-In-Time to Just-In-Case. This is a significant change that many companies like yours fail to embrace. In your chosen Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system, how accurate and complete the information about the assets and equipment you own and operate highlights whether your company has evolved from the business of constructing-or-acquiring to top quartile owning-and-operating. Just-in-Time means having only the plans and materials needed in time for each stage of construction. Once in day-to-day operation, Just-In-Case means you need ALL the information about ALL your operating assets and equipment IN-CASE any of them break. Since we need to be successful in an imperfect world, the best way to reduce risk and optimize performance is to have at our fingertips all the information necessary and the critical parts available to bring any, but especially all mainline critical equipment back into operation as quickly as possible when it fails.
It would take too much time here to explain all the possible reasons why primary industrial operations like yours historically have poor-quality asset information in their business systems. You yourself know whether you and your company have this issue or not.
Companies like yours have repeatedly tried and failed to get and maintain accurate asset information in their business systems. Again, it would take too long to explain all the possible reasons why. The overarching explanation is that there was never a clear move in corporate mindset from Just-In-Time to Just-In-Case. This shows itself with the same project-oriented mentality of carrying out a one-time process to gather this information when your post-project information landscape is guaranteed to change. The low-cost process we would like to discuss with you is one that you would adopt and use for as long as you own and operate your field and plant equipment to ensure that the asset information in your EAM is always up-to-date, verified, and trusted.