Cern keeps an eye on its assets

As one of the largest-scale scientific projects ever undertaken, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has millions of material assets - worth around $4.6bn in total - that need to be tracked.

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The engineering support team is using Infor's enterprise asset management (EAM) software to keep track of items ranging from those used in the particle accelerator - such as huge magnets and cryogenic equipment - to roads and maintenance tools.

Speaking at Infor's user conference in Las Vegas, engineering process support manager at Cern, David Widegren, said: "It's very important we have a single place to store everything. For us it's very important for there to be traceability."

Currently the team has around 600,000 assets in the EAM database, located in 420,000 item positions. Around 4,000 assets are added per month.

Widegren added the EAM system encompasses the design, manufacturing, installation, commissioning, maintenance and dismantling of equipment. "We need to make sure [assets] are monitored in a coherent way," he said.

The prime aim of asset management at the LHC is to minimise downtime of the facility by limiting the time needed to identify and address problems.

If there is a problem in the LHC it takes three weeks to warm 37,500 tonnes of equipment from an operating temperature of -468 degrees Fahrenheit in order to be worked on. It then takes a further three weeks to cool it back down.

Widegren said building and operating the LHC would have been impossible without the EAM system as the amount of assets, procedures and compliance demands would have been too much to cope with otherwise.

Further complicating matters, as Cern is a publicly funded project, it needs to regularly change sub-contractors making it even harder to track assets.

"Thanks to [using Infor's EAM], we can have much more efficient maintenance contracts," Widegren added.

Using the system the 250-strong team can also register problems and create work orders, which then send texts or emails to the relevant maintenance team.

In addition, by scanning barcodes, engineers can find out the operations and maintenance history of an item as well as its sub-components and changes made from the initial design.

The team plans to upgrade to a newer version of Infor's EAM in the first quarter of 2009 and other projects in the pipeline include improved spare parts management, mobile functionality and a more sophisticated geographical information system for locating items.