05 July 2012

CERN turns to Infor10 for enterprise asset management

CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research now famous for confirming the presence of the Higgs Boson, is using Infor10 enterprise asset management to look after more than one million pieces of equipment.

The project – which dates back 15 years to 1997 when datasets were first harmonised and migrated to the R5 solution from SQL Systems, now Infor10 EAM – was originally aimed at sharing data and setting up procedures.

However, earlier this year, a maintenance order management platform for mobile engineers and technicians went live. Also, an 'EAM Lite' data access application over the web is now being implemented ready for availability next summer (2013).

CERN systems engineer Pedro Martel explains that every user will then be able to adapt the system to their own working environment, based on a secure data foundation.

"We are continuing to develop new projects around Infor10 EAM, based on integrating new applications that provide our users with more services. [This] means that, in particular, they can overcome a certain number of time and location based constraints."

And he adds that late last year, the Infor10 EAM solution was interfaced with an ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) service desk tool, which provides all users with a single point of contact, whatever type of maintenance problem has to be dealt with.

That tool was deployed in November 2011 and went live at the beginning of 2012. It enabled up to 700 maintenance orders to be catalogued in Infor10 EAM for January 2012 alone.

With more than one million pieces of equipment to manage, in addition to its internal personnel, CERN uses about 50 external service providers, with a range of service agreements, including fixed-fee contracts, performance-based contracts, task and component based agreements etc.

Hence, says Martel, the requirement for a flexible management system, so that every equipment item and maintenance task can be traced – so helping to anticipate malfunctions and maintain uptime for CERN's scientific research programmes.

Today, a large part of CERN's infrastructure maintenance activities, such as caretaking, roads, heating and cooling, security etc, as well as part of its scientific instrumentation activity, are managed using Infor10 EAM, he says.

The system generates more than 180,000 work orders per year, schedules preventative maintenance tasks, provides stock control functionality and organises maintenance and inspection programmes.

For the scientific instruments, a manufacturing control system has also been set up. With about 200,000 in-scope equipment items identified, Infor10 EAM has become the heart of this system.

"Maintenance starts as soon as an event has been generated in the Infor10 EAM system," explains Martel. "If the solution is not available, maintenance cannot be carried out. Only data stored in Infor10 EAM is considered valid and only data entered into the system can be used for payment."

Author
Brian Tinham

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Infor

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