Locating 3,000 assets before they can even be inspected

The problem

The time was lost before the inspection, not during it.

On an industrial site of roughly 3,000 assets, operators spent a large share of their time physically locating the valves to inspect. Drawings, field markings and the reality of the site didn't always let them find the target quickly — some valves had become nearly invisible, even inaccessible.

The governing constraint

It wasn't a maintenance problem. It was a location problem.

The real knot wasn't speeding up the inspection itself, but removing the time lost before the intervention: knowing precisely where an asset is in a complex industrial environment, even when visual cues no longer suffice.

The approach

Reframe the problem as a spatial one.

Rather than yet another maintenance tool, I combined the assets' position data with the sensors already on a tablet — GPS, orientation / magnetometer — and an augmented-reality view to guide the operator straight to the target asset.

The same approach even located a buried valve by working out exactly where to dig.

The result

Above all, the main bottleneck — searching for the asset before being able to work on it — was largely removed.