Experience
Operational systems developed from practical requirements.
Greg Sier & Associates has worked with operational information systems across heavy equipment, maintenance, workshops, asset management, reporting and maritime operations.
A substantial part of that history developed through Customised Plant Management — CPM.
CPM was built around practical maintenance and equipment-management requirements rather than around a generic software architecture. Its functional areas included assets and equipment history, work orders, scheduled maintenance, fuel and oil, condition monitoring, tyres, inventory and purchasing, workshop activity, reporting and operational analysis.
From equipment records to lifecycle models
The original emphasis was often on individual functions: the asset register, work order, service schedule, oil sample, purchase order and history record.
The more useful question became how those functions influence each other.
production demand
→ utilisation
→ component life
→ maintenance demand
→ resource requirement
→ availability
→ costThat shift from isolated modules towards connected operating models now influences the current work.
Heavy equipment and maintenance
Heavy equipment remains an important foundation because mobile plant forces a system to deal with operating hours and other service-meter units, component replacement, fuel and lubricant use, condition, operator effects, site movements, production, downtime, workshop capacity, parts demand and both planned and unplanned work.
These problems helped shape the broader asset-lifecycle thinking now applied to other operating environments.
Beyond mobile plant
The same modelling approach changes according to the operation.
Fixed plant places more emphasis on functional location, process dependency, isolation and shutdown planning. Roads and structures depend on condition, inspection, defects, interventions and geographic relationships. Mining safety systems may centre on hazards, controls, verification, exceptions and corrective action. Maritime systems may be driven by voyages, licences, port calls, vessels, cargo and compliance events.
The applications look different because the underlying operating models are different.
Modernisation
The history of CPM also creates a useful perspective on legacy systems.
Older software can have technical limitations while still containing valuable operating knowledge. Modernisation should distinguish obsolete technology from useful domain logic.
A practical sequence is often:
understand → extract → simplify → preserve → restructure → integrate → replace where necessaryCurrent direction
Current development increasingly uses DSLCore, a platform for expressing operational entities, relationships, workflows and rules as structured models and turning those models into working applications.
This allows operating-model experience developed through CPM and other systems to be applied across a broader range of specialised operational problems.