I manage facilities for a small

[Alisa Nazarova]

Good morning. I manage facilities for a small manufacturing site and we have an ongoing problem with documentation. Machines arrive with manuals, the manuals go into a filing cabinet, and by the time anyone needs one it has vanished. We have maybe forty pieces of equipment and I would estimate we hold paper for less than half. I am trying to build something more reliable. How do other sites handle this without a full asset management system? The equipment ranges from fairly new to machines that predate everyone currently working here.

[Konstantin Volkov]

A full system is overkill at forty assets, most sites your size run a simple register instead: one row per machine with make, model, serial, and a link to the documentation. The register is the important part, not the storage. For the gaps in your paper archive, an online source fills them faster than writing to manufacturers, and ManualMachine https://manualmachine.com/ covers a wide range of industrial brands. Record the plate details for every machine now, while people who know the equipment are still there. That data is what disappears when someone retires, not the paperwork. For the older machines, ask the people who run them what they know before it goes into the register, that knowledge is not written down anywhere else.

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