The Next Era in Logbooks: Enabling Communication, Collaboration and Compliance
In today's global market, companies face multiple challenges in their quest to remain competitive and follow sustainable business practices. A critical focus for most is ensuring safe and optimal operations in order to minimize potential impact to their plant assets, local community and plant economics. Regulatory pressures designed to alleviate environmental, safety and security concerns are on the rise. Valuable knowledge is lost as experienced employees retire without the opportunity or resources to communicate their knowledge to new employees. Capturing and sharing this knowledge is a crucial factor in overcoming these challenges.
One key source of plant information and knowledge is the logbook. At a glance, a logbook is a repository of events where employees track and communicate any changes in operational status, including any work being executed at a facility. A logbook contains key events, incidents, activities and actions that are driven by guidelines, standard operating procedures and the expertise of employees. The valuable knowledge recorded in a logbook can be used to support processes such as shift handovers, group meetings, incident reviews and investigations, and to report on regulatory matters. However, the logbook is often underutilized, isolated in a room and accessible to only a limited group of people.
Matrikon understands the value of the knowledge captured in logbooks and the new Matrikon™ Electronic Logbook, empowered by Intuition, is designed to make the best possible use of this knowledge. Electronic Logbook embraces the three major pillars of Operational Excellence and sustainability initiatives:
- Communication for ensuring safe operation of facilities and assets
- Collaboration for maintaining facilities and assets in safe operations over time
- Compliance for satisfying regulatory requirements
This whitepaper discusses best practices for:
- Promoting effective communication
- Collaborating through automated processes and modeling
- Managing an efficient shift handover
- Raising accountability and supporting compliance reporting