NSA corrective maintenance reporting upgrade: a status report

Description

The ARM North Slope of Alaska (NSA) Site Operations team has deployed a new corrective maintenance reporting (CMR) database. The aim of the new development is to increase the quality, completeness, and number of corrective maintenance reports after each intervention on any of the instrument or infrastructure systems at the ARM NSA facilities of Barrow, Atqasuk, and Oliktok. The application was built using common open-source components and a flexible and easy-to-manage data model with a view towards generalization to other ARM sites and interoperability with other program-wide reporting tools (OSS, DQPR, DQPR, weekly reports, IMMS). After two months of exclusive production use, the new database is well accepted. The transfer of maintenance information from the sites improved, and an increase in the number of CM reports has been noted.

The new CMR database ensures improved consistency and completeness of reports with an easy-to-use, fast, and appealing user interface. Feedback from operators and other members of the ARM community has been decisive in considering trade-offs such as between the level of detail collected and the complexity of the task of filling in a CM reporting form. Characteristic features are more fine-grained notification subscription options, improved reporting capabilities, improved editing capabilities including the option to attach image files, import of legacy CM data, and easy search capabilities. At the same time, the new application is making operational tasks such as weekly status reporting or the linking of DQPR and OSS entries back to maintenance reports, noticeably easier. The distinction between optional, configurable, and required data fields facilitates the extension of the database system to other facilities in ARM.