Operation and maintenance costs often represent the single most significant component of the overall price of a project. Reducing those charges through better systems, strategies, and planning could be very helpful for your budget.
But many people aren’t aware of what operation and maintenance (O&M) and field support are – let alone what improving them can do for a company.
That’s why we’ve put together this article. It highlights everything you need to know about O&M and field support to make your next project more successful.
Table of Contents
About O&M and Field Support
O&M is an acronym that stands for operations and maintenance. It’s commonly attached to field support because all three services encompass many of the same things at a high level.
Operations, maintenance, and field support involve having a team of professionals come to your job site, assess how you’re running it, and help you propose improvements that can increase safety, reduce waste, and help you get more out of your budget.
Field support is where the rubber hits the road, and it involves having a team come out and help you implement the recommended upgrades. You can achieve significant improvements in record time when you put all three of these together.
The Importance of O&M and Field Support
Operations, maintenance, and field support determine whether a project will fail or succeed. Here’s why each of them matters.
Operations
With operations support, you get a thorough review of your company’s practices to manage its project. This can help you identify how optimized your processes are at the time.
Maintenance
Maintenance ensures that your implemented processes and strategies don’t decay over time. If you’re doing something that’s working for your business, then you want to ensure that it remains that way throughout the project duration.
Field Support
Field support involves having a company come out into the field and support your project in whatever necessary ways to help you achieve your goals.
Whether that means assessing various aspects of the site’s quality (like soil and groundwater) or helping your supervisors implement the new strategies that you’ve created, field support is where it happens.
How Does The Process Work?
O&M and field support can be confusing for people who have never experienced it before. But in many cases, it will look something like the following.
1. Initial Interviews
Your O&M and field support company will likely begin the process by reaching out to critical stakeholders and interviewing them. They may get in touch with project managers, supervisors, company leaders, and others during this time.
The point of initial interviews is to gather information about the project, the company’s practices, and its goals. The data collected during this stage will shape how the company that you’ve hired approaches the project moving forward.
2. Assessment of Site and Practices
Next up, the company you hire will likely go out to your job site and evaluate its condition and the practices used by your employees. This is another information-gathering step that helps the company you hire figure out what’s happening in practice instead of theory.
For example, they may find that your employees aren’t following the practices you asked them to because they are unrealistic, too time-consuming, or won’t allow them to do their jobs effectively.
3. Evaluation of Information
At this stage, the company you hire has all the data and information it needs to figure out what your project is missing, how it can be improved, and what you should focus on moving forward to achieve your goals.
It will review all of this information, view it as a whole, and then get back to you.
4. Proposal of New Practices
Now that the information has been gathered and evaluated, your O&M company will likely come back to you with new ideas for how you work your job site and move forward with the project.
These new practices may be entirely different from your current ones, or they may only be minor adjustments. It all depends on the data gathered during the first few stages.
5. Implementation and Tracking
Finally, the company will help you implement the strategies that it has proposed and begin tracking your performance while you do. This will give them the information they need to decide whether additional steps are necessary or if you’re on track to reaching your goals.
Part of the implementation process may also involve providing more in-depth field support to your team. But this depends on what the project needs.
Examples of O&M Services
O&M is a broad field encompassing many types of service and support. For example, your project or job site may be able to benefit from the following:
- Monthly site visits and performance reviews
- Preventative maintenance
- Onsite sample analysis
- Data management and evaluation
- Emergy service
These are just a few examples of the kinds of tasks that a team of O&M experts will be able to help you with.
Our O&M and Field Support Services
AOTC offers a wide variety of O&M and field support services that may be able to help you take your project to the next level. Whether you’re looking to reduce costs, increase safety, or improve your operational efficiency, we can support you in whatever ways are necessary to make it happen.
For example, we offer:
- “Advanced” Oxidation Processes
- Adsorbent Medias
- Air-Sparging
- Air-Stripping
- Applied Oxidation Processes
- Bio-Venting and Bio-Remediation
- Catalytic Oxidation
- Chemical Oxidation
- Dual-Phase Extraction
- Natural Attenuation
- Sand Filters
- Soil Excavation, Removal, and Disposal
- Soil Vapor Extraction
- And more
The bottom line is we should be able to help no matter what kind of O&M or field support you want. Get in touch with us today to learn more about what we can do for you.