Asset Care - best way to make a manual ?

[JohnnyT]

Please bear with me with this question... here we go.

I've been tasked to make a manual for a machine to help our maintenance team. The machine is a filling machine on a soft drinks production line.

I thought the best form for the manual would be pages of Flow diagrams pointing the maintenance team to particular faults. For instance:
Will the machine run?
No---
Try pressing 'reset', is it running now?
No---
etc etc

Obviously, the manual will be more compartmentalised and more accurate than that but you get the idea.

I want the manual to be PC based (although there will be hard copies printed out and left with the machine) which would allow it to be searchable and easily updated by the maintenance team as and when they come across new faults. This way, it would develop into an oracle of knowledge and it should bring fault-finding times down dramatically.

Now... here's the question. Have you any thoughts on the best software to use for this? I thought about using Excel, or even just making a PDF file with Acrobat.

Has anyone any experience of anything similar?

Is there packages available that can aid this sort of thing (although it would need to be standalone as it would be impractical to install specific software on all machines in the factory - obviously Excel is already on most machines)?

Has anyone any thoughts on how this could be achieved?

I would really appreciate any help you can give me on this, it could be a really good project for me if I can ascertain how to go about it.

Thank you for any help you can give me.

Cheers

John

PS. I was unsure which forum to put this is and chose this one as it does come under the category of "Asset Care", please let me know if it is incorrectly placed.

I don't make mistakes, I'm merely beta-testing life.

 

[Spirit]

I think I would use your method above using MS Visio flow chart which can then be printed to PDF. Its expensive tho' especially if this is the only time you'll do it.

Good luck,

Iain