In this article, we speak with Stuart Burckhardt, co-founder and CEO of OnPlan Technologies (now part of the COSOL group) about how the OnPlan digital work management platform is digitising maintenance for industrial workforces and enhancing the capabilities of leading ERP systems such as SAP for asset management.
OnPlan Technologies is part of the AssetOn Group which was recently acquired by COSOL.
The AssetOn Group has been providing high-quality asset management skills, experienced professionals, and technology solutions to major clients across the Natural Resources, and Energy & Water Utility sector since 2016. AssetOn Group’s service offering is underpinned by its proprietary software platform OnPlan - a Software as a Service (“SaaS”) product that is an end-to-end enterprise-grade digital system for efficiently building, maintaining, and deploying asset strategy and work instructions for large industrial assets. The AssetOn Group including OnPlan Technologies was acquired by COSOL in 2023.
At a glance
- A Digital Work Management Platform, OnPlan was designed to help organisations with large industrial assets to digitise their maintenance content and workflows to unlock efficiencies, promote safe working practices and ensure standardised work.
- Clients of have consistently seen a 60% reduction in their maintenance content development; and a 25% increase in job productivity.
- OnPlan easily integrates with leading Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems including SAP to further enhance their asset management capability.
- OnPlan will be demonstrated at the upcoming Mastering SAP conference alongside the COSOL team.
Can you provide an overview of what OnPlan is?
OnPlan is a work management system for the execution of maintenance, operations and work. A software platform with a mobile app, it was built for technicians to execute maintenance work in the field, and to help asset managers standardise and automate processes, maintain institutional knowledge, improve reliability, reduce downtime and work safely.
It is purpose-built to digitalise content and workflows including:
- Work instructions
- Maintenance checklists
- Equipment inspections
- Maintenance Work packs
- Equipment strategies
- Service sheets
How did OnPlan come about?
As specialists in developing maintenance work instructions and master data for mobile mining equipment, AssetOn recognised that there was a better and more efficient way of doing this activity using technology - this led us to develop a tool to assist us, and our clients. Through further development and refinement, the tool morphed into OnPlan which we now offer commercially to owners and operators of large industrial assets across all major industry sectors Australia-wide.
Creating OnPlan could not have been more timely. We have seen an increasingly ferocious appetite in industry for all things ‘digital’, ‘mobile’, and ‘integrated’, and we have seen significant pressure on organisations to ‘digitise’ their work management processes and content. However, the task of converting tens of thousands of complex and equipment-specific documents, instructions, operational instructions, and checklists is a massive one. For these organisations to truly enable mobility, documentation needs to be properly digitised (i.e. not just a PDFed) - this is where OnPlan comes in.
How does OnPlan work?
Digitising asset management processes start with digitising maintenance content first, then the workflows.
OnPlan is a tool-kit built to enable digitisation of this content at scale and help owners of large industrial assets achieve massive improvements in efficiencies, accuracy, safety, and asset stability. OnPlan integrates easily with ERP’s and CMMS - SAP, Pronto, JDE, and Microsoft Dynamics to enhance their asset management capability.
OnPlan is made up of three major parts:
1. Inspection & Work Instruction Builder - a cloud-based builder which develops digital versions of maintenance forms, checklists, work packs and operating instructions.
2. Work Management Integrator - a work management tool to link the digital content to CMMS or ERP work orders and provide a real-time summary of work progress.
3. Mobilise Execution App - an intuitive mobile app for asset maintainers to access and execute maintenance checklists and work instructions in the field.
What benefits can customer typically see when using OnPlan?
At a high level, digital documentation tightens asset management strategy and execution to improve overall asset health, site safety, and statutory compliance.
Using OnPlan, customers can ensure that their operations are compliant and that work is executed efficiently and safely. This is achieved by ensuring the delivery of the right digital maintenance content to field, workshop, engineering, and management teams and that otherwise manual processes are automated - saving time, reducing errors, and making sure nothing slips through the cracks.
For clients, OnPlan’s workflow and import tools have consistently reduced their content development time by up to 60%! Additionally, clients have seen job productivity increase by 25%, and equipment uptime increase by 2-5%.
From a day-to-day operational perspective:
- Asset managers have more control over processes, improving asset, safety and maintenance performance
- Engineers are empowered to build digital content and workflow to control processes, mandate data entry, and automate predefined processes.
- Field technician’s can easily view 3D imagery of equipment, overlaid with digital interactivity and equipment-specific instructions or checklists via a mobile device. They can then use OnPlan to capture data, notifications and even photos infield to send to their ERP or CMMS.
How does OnPlan work alongside ERP’s such as SAP
OnPlan is a cloud-based platform that enhances the asset management capability of CMMSs and ERPs by integrating the digital work management seamlessly. For SAP, OnPlan’s features integrate with SAP Assets, Work Orders, and Task records. This makes it easy to efficiently build and execute centralised, digital, and mobile work management processes end-to-end including:
- automation of document production from SAP records
- search and re-use of repeatable content and maintenance tasks
- centralisation of document updates
- automation of work order documentation from work schedules
- trigger of workflow and standardised data entry rules
- enabling output to digital app for paper format
The OnPlan mobile app runs on most modern devices and tablets and uses features familiar to users to efficiently capture execution data including making notes, taking photos, or marking-ups digitally. The OnPlan app then sends execution data back to SAP.
Above: End-to-End Work Management in SAP
Learn more about the OnPlan Digital Work Management solution
Visit the OnPlan Technologies website to learn more about how this solution might work for your organisation.