“From Work Order to Wisdom: Building a Maintenance Learning Culture”, WIRAM Africa Chapter discusses how to go beyond what seems like a simple Work Order exercise

With great success, WIRAM Africa hosted the webinar “From Work Order to Wisdom: Building a Maintenance Learning Culture,” -an engaging discussion on work orders in industrial maintenance and how to extract value from them. The webinar featured Irene Mokgobadi, Director of the WIRAM Africa Chapter, who was joined by experts Moses Luanda, Mechanical Rotating Engineer at East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) from Tanzania; and Mary Nnanna Adanna, Mechanical Reliability Engineer at Dangote Cement plc from Nigeria.

This webinar took place on October 22, and  is part of the activities by Women in Reliability and Asset Management (WIRAM) to elevate and highlight the role and contributions of women in our industry. In this case, the webinar revolved around documentation within industrial maintenance. Work orders can become the guiding thread of high-value knowledge and information, showing maintenance traceability, usage, breakdowns, repairs, and specific asset conditions, as well as how the organization can leverage this knowledge.

“We will look at maintenance from its documentation aspect; a work order is not just about doing or executing; it’s about understanding what the equipment record tells us, what we’ve done, its history, what worked, how we can improve it, and what the next person coming to use it might find. Even in a breakdown situation, we must ask ourselves the question: What did we learn so that the next person doesn’t have to go through the same thing? The next person doesn’t have to discover this again because we have already learned and documented it” -Mary said during the session. Using work orders to avoid repeating mistakes was the central focus of the first part of the discussion.

Documenting is not just dumping data; it is highly classified and actionable organizational knowledge that can impact maintenance planning, spare parts, labor, database, workflows, planning and execution of maintenance strategies, and the feedback needed to extract as much value as possible from all that information. To illustrate the topic more precisely, Moses Luanda presented a fan maintenance case study, a real maintenance case to demonstrate how to move from the work order to organizational knowledge.