When an asset fails unexpectedly on a site, the investigation usually finds the same thing: it was not really unexpected. A reading had been creeping up. An inspector had noted something. A repair had been done twice on the same component. Each of those signs was recorded somewhere. None of them were in the same place, and nobody was looking at them together.
The cost of a failure like that is not the repair. It is the downtime, the lost production, the people put at risk, and on a mine site, the chance that the failure is a fire rather than a stoppage.
Why the history is unusable
- Inspections are filed by date, not by asset. The register has every inspection done in March. Finding every inspection of pump 14 over two years means going through every month.
- Readings get recorded but never compared. This month's temperature is on this month's sheet and last month's is on last month's. The trend exists, but nobody has drawn it.
- Repairs live in a different system from inspections. Maintenance has the work orders. Safety has the inspections. The contractor has the thermal survey. The asset's history is split three ways.
- Follow-ups are remembered rather than scheduled. An inspector recommends a re-check in four weeks. Four weeks later that recommendation is on a sheet in a folder.
Getting ahead of it without new software
The first step is a single register organised by asset, with every inspection, reading and repair logged against the asset's ID. That can be done in a spreadsheet. Add a trend column for the critical readings so a rising number shows up on a chart rather than as a figure on a page. Give every recommendation a follow-up date and review what is due each week. It is manual and depends on someone keeping it up, but it changes the question from "what did we inspect in March?" to "what is happening to this asset?"
Tracking each asset over its life
Sites that catch failures early have a system built around the asset rather than the inspection. Every asset has an identity and a history. Every inspection, survey, reading and repair is attached to it. Critical readings are trended automatically, and a hotspot or a rising value gets flagged rather than noticed. Recommendations become scheduled follow-ups. Repairs close the loop, and an asset that keeps needing the same repair stands out.
That is what My Asset View does for thermographers. Thermal surveys are captured on site, fully offline, against each asset. The system identifies hotspots, tracks each asset over its life and shows the trend, so a fault is found as a pattern across surveys rather than as a breakdown. The report to the client is a ranked list of assets at risk, with the evidence behind each one.
The same structure works for any operation with a lot of assets: fixed plant, mobile fleet, electrical infrastructure, lifting equipment. The inspections are probably already being done. What is missing is a system that remembers them per asset and tells you what they add up to.
If your failures only make sense in hindsight, have a look at what we build for mining and resources, or tell us how inspections and repairs are recorded today.
