What if industrial maintenance started at the design stage?
Long considered a downstream stage, industrial maintenance is now moving much earlier into the product life cycle. With the latest release of 3DEXPERIENCE from Dassault Systèmes, it is reconnecting with design data to improve consistency, traceability and efficiency, say CIMPA’s Innovation Manager and Performance and Simulation expert Manon Alzetta and Team Leader Eric Amardheil.
We often think of maintenance as the final link in an industrial chain. It comes into play once a failure has been detected, driven by field feedback fed back into the ERP. This division of responsibilities has proved remarkably persistent. Yet it is now beginning to crack.
The latest release of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is specifically addressing this link by connecting it directly to the upstream stages of design, the bill of materials, and the maintenance plan. “What is changing is that we are taking customer service and connecting it directly to integrated logistics support,” says Eric Amardheil, Team Leader at CIMPA. “It’s a paradigm shift.”
Maintenance home is changing address
Integrated logistics support, he points out, is already responsible for building the maintenance plan, including the criticality level of a part, intervention frequency and wear thresholds. Until now, this information remained siloed, while customer service (technical writing and spare parts management) operated at the end of the chain, using its own tools.
The new release brings the two worlds closer together by making them coexist on the same platform, connected to design data. “We are pooling the tools, creating consistency between the maintenance plan, procedures and publication, all the way through to drawings and illustrations,” he explains.
The Toulouse aerospace sector is taking a close interest in this for its new programmes. Rail has a head start after SNCF tested an initial prototype supplied by Dassault Systèmes at the beginning of the year.
One set of data, no duplication
The second benefit lies in the very structure of the platform. Directly connected to the E-BOM (the engineering bill of materials), the S-BOM (the maintenance bill of materials) automatically inherits its changes. “If there is a change at E-BOM level, we no longer need to carry out a complete assessment. We already know that there is an impact,” explains Amardheil.
The impact still needs to be qualified (is the part concerned a candidate for a maintenance intervention or not?), but the work is carried out in the same tool, without re-entering data or transferring it from one system to another.
He also sees an environmental benefit. “It’s an ecological approach, we stop duplicating data and adding more of it to servers,” he says.
Writers and illustrators, on the same platform
The closer integration also affects technical illustration, historically a separate profession. The writer lays out their text based on the 3D modelling, while the illustrator then produces isometric views or exploded views, with their own constraints.
With the 3D model directly available on the platform, these stages are being reconfigured. “There is no longer any need for one dedicated tool to make video and another tool to make flat drawings. Instead, you can record an exploded view, make a video, take a photo and attach it to a maintenance procedure, all from the same place,” says Amardheil.
A maintenance centre is a factory
Manon Alzetta, Innovation Manager at CIMPA, highlights another advantage of the platform. Flow simulation, which until now has been applied to production sites rather than maintenance centres. “A maintenance centre is still a factory, with operations, workstations, operators, work instructions, maintenance manuals and tasks to be carried out in a certain order,” she observes. “Today, we are not necessarily focusing on a product or a reference; we are focusing on an industrial system.”
A rail customer illustrates the point. It has several maintenance sites and a recurring sizing question. For a train that is 50 or 100 metres long do we have the right tooling on site, the right skills? “The platform makes it possible to compare maintenance operators, their skills and their certifications,” explains Amardheil.
The challenge remains the same as in industry more broadly, notes Alzetta – the data required for these simulations remains scattered across Excel files, SharePoint, Drive and business tools, requiring patient data collection from the operational teams who hold it.
This digital continuity will soon take on a regulatory dimension. Amardheil anticipates the arrival of the digital product passport, which will require manufacturers to demonstrate the traceability of every reference making up a complex technical object. “It’s an obligation that will become mandatory over the next four years,” he warns. According to Alzetta, this deadline will extend well beyond aerospace to affect the automotive industry and other industrial sectors.
Data, adoption, price
Three obstacles are still slowing large-scale deployment, however. The first remains the data itself: disparate, sometimes incomplete, and held by operational teams rather than centralised – precisely an issue that Dassault Systèmes’ latest 3DEXPERIENCE release should help resolve over the medium term, according to Alzetta.
The second is cultural. “The Industry 4.0 mindset, digital twin, anticipation, is perceived from an operational point of view as something that is there more to monitor than to help staff in their work,” she observes. Convincing field teams that these tools serve their work rather than monitor it remains, she says, the condition for successful adoption.
The third obstacle is budgetary. “It requires having a turnover that is consistent with the price of the solution. Today, it is more aimed at industrial companies of a fairly substantial size,” acknowledges Amardheil. Licences, labour and skills development also mean deployment happens in stages, rather than all at once. Before, perhaps, expanding the range of possibilities.
Despite these hurdles, the direction of travel is clear. As design, maintenance and operational data become more closely connected, manufacturers have an opportunity to treat maintenance not as an activity that begins once a product is in service, but as something designed into it from the outset.
Deployment may be gradual, but for Alzetta and Amardheil the potential lies precisely in this continuity: fewer silos, better traceability and a much broader ability to anticipate how products and industrial systems will perform throughout their life cycle.