I am young engineer and needs to know how to code equipment in a plant for maintenance and inventory purposes .the plant has a water treatment plant, cooling towers ,distillery, loading bay, yeast plant ,waste water treatmnet and raw material storage. how do you start it and what is the standard way of doing it since i am getting confused .  My boss has given be these job  and no one had ever done it .

Dickens K. Seroney (B. Tech in Chem and process eng./ball valve)Moi,Kenya
Planning and development engineer.

You just start and maintain a database (it could be on paper, but computers make it easier to use) keyed on some arbitrary machine identifier, e.g. a big number tag riveted to the machine, comprising a description of what the unit is, who made it, its serial numbers, record(s) of any irregular maintenance peformed on it, record(s) of any regular maintenance performed, ticklers for regular or planned maintenance.  In this case, you'd also want to record how big the unit is, both dimensions and capacity wise, what fluids it normally carries, any electrical requirements, part numbers and sourcing info for commonly used repair parts like seals and gaskets, and anything else that comes to mind while you are methodically plodding around recording data.  In line with that, I'd also throw in some digital photos of the equipment, a record of when it was purchased, how much it cost, how long it's expected to last, too.

Even if you never finish, it's a pretty good way to get familiar with the plant.  That may have been the actual intent.

I'm sure there are commercial programs sold for this purpose, but a homemade spreadsheet could do a satisfactory job of it, too, and will teach you more.

Oh.  Yeah.  Eventually, you should be able to answer manager type questions like how much it would cost to replace everything, what equipment will need regular maintenance in the next month, what parts will be required as a minimum for that maintenance, how much it really costs to keep each machine from year to year, whether there is an upward trend in failure rate for some equipment or department, stuff like that.

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