After over 20 years running maintenance assessments worldwide, Siveco has shown that poor maintenance can drag down profits by up to 40%. Based on a unique experience combining both industrial maintenance expertise and consulting project in China, Siveco has developed a proven maintenance assessment methodology: an approach that has delivered results for many facility owners in China.

The world has known three industrial revolutions and the fourth one is well on its way. Dubbed Industry 4.0 by German industry strategists, it promotes increased computerization and integration of industrial systems. With Industry 4.0, all the latest buzzwords: Big Data, 3D printing, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Smart Factory, BIM and many more, get combined into one single concept or, as some contrarians might say, into one giant marketing gimmick (hence this article).

Transition from construction to maintenance represents a major challenge in the Chinese market, more particularly when it comes to documentation for Operation & Maintenance (O&M). While building owners find it very difficult to obtain real as-built drawings, equipment documentation is also lacking and maintenance guidelines impossible to find. As a result, FM teams are often left to improvise their maintenance activity, relying on the experience of their team members.

This article is a follow-up on the article “A practical application of international maintenance standards in China”, published in 2010. In the past few years, Siveco China has gone much further and developed project guidelines for the implementation of international maintenance standards through the utilization of our technological tools. Those guidelines are used internally in our customer projects, as part of our ISO 9001-certified procedures.

The scope of Siveco’s Enhanced Support Contract has been covered in previous articles. Over the years more and more clients have joined the program, benefiting from it in various ways. For this month’s Reliability article, we would like to feature two practical examples from clients we recently visited during the week-long visit of Siveco’s Operation Director Guillaume Gimonet and Customer Service Manager Sunny Wang in Guangdong province in early April.

An increasing number of Siveco customers choose to outsource the hosting of their solutions, instead of investing in their own servers and hiring the IT resources required to maintain them. This is true not only of smaller companies without a strong IT department, but also of larger corporations with very well-established in-house IT team.