How to improve the management of maintenance providers?

Maintenance service providers: Tips to improve their management

We often hear that the industry would deal with 75% of its industrial maintenance needs only internally and 25% by a service provider: how to explain this reluctance?

The observation is clear: many companies are still afraid to use subcontractors today for multiple reasons. Whether they find it difficult to properly control the work done, whether they want to maintain a certain know-how in their manufacturing processes or even whether they consider themselves lacking autonomy, all these reasons seem legitimate. Many companies also say they fear being technically dependent on their service providers or seeing production costs skyrocket if they do not have sufficient visibility into operations.

However, using service providers must make it possible to optimize manufacturing processes or industrial maintenance, and even to reduce internal costs, in an ever more pressing concern to rationalize costs. In this dynamic, companies must be given the opportunity to control services. A good CMMS software, coupled with excellent management of maintenance contracts, guarantee successful and facilitated outsourcing.

What types of outsourcing are possible?

Before a company turns to a service provider, it needs to define a strategy beforehand. There are several types of outsourcing:

• Service provider/capacity subcontracting: the company has the total capacity to carry out a given operation but it prefers to delegate;
• Specialty service provider/subcontracting: the company does not have the technical means to carry out an operation because it does not fall within its field of action (because of its technicality for example);
• Cascade service provider/subcontracting: company A will call on company B, which will itself use the services of company C, etc. This operating procedure aims to meet a pressing need of companies that require more and more flexibility and responsiveness, so segmentation makes the various actors more effective;
• First-level service provider/subcontracting: the company decides to subcontract directly with several providers, by systematically preparing contracts directly with each of them, without there being an intermediary.

We will better understand why subcontracting can represent a difficult problem for a large number of companies, which need to be reassured about the relevance of their approach.

A search for service providers that is often problematic

If businesses generally express a certain reluctance to engage in outsourcing, it is because the path can be full of pitfalls. Many structures have been working with one and the same service provider for many years, because they have succeeded in establishing a certain relationship of trust and because they do not necessarily dare to take the risk of studying the competition.

Outsourcing certain operations is nevertheless essential for multiple reasons: a company may very well, at a given moment, be confronted with too much workload, be unable to carry out excessively specialized work (such as thermography, etc.) or encounter serious recruitment problems.

But the question remains a double-edged sword since companies frequently complain that they cannot fully manage their service providers. They often have difficulty in clearly monitoring the contracts signed or the tasks carried out and the techniques used by a service provider and have the impression that they do not have everything under control. This can be a problem if the service provider makes mistakes and generates machine failures, since companies will have to incur costs. The whole process therefore requires strict documentation management and the establishment of a certain number of standards, so that work procedures are clearly established and the company protects itself.

Take an inventory of your maintenance providers

To provide a solution to all these problems, it is necessary to link GMAO and service provider. If your tool allows you to follow them and monitor their interventions, all your productivity will be increased and your sustainability ensured.

Our Mobility Work solution gives you the possibility, directly in the application, to create your provider files in order to list the companies you have used. This feature helps you keep track of all services: on each new sheet, you provide all the useful information concerning the subcontractor (name, field of activity, geographical location, etc.) and, by registering it, you automatically share it with your entire network. Thanks to the action of the entire community, everyone benefits from a unique directory of maintenance professionals, who see their collaboration greatly facilitated. The perfect provider is only a few clicks away from you! In the application, you will also find a catalog of official service providers, validated by Mobility Work, to quickly find a solution and not waste time solving a problem.

Thus integrated into your CMMS, the subcontractor has access to the task calendar and must therefore work with the tool to give you a precise vision of his work. He will act like any technician in your company and will have to detail each of his activities. Thus, it is no longer really a separate dark entity but is an integral part of your network and its actions are coordinated with those of technicians and maintenance managers.

Access all the information on your spare parts from the equipment sheet in your Mobility Work application

You can save all the documents you think are useful directly in the application: official documents put online by the official suppliers, technical documents, company standards, etc. This resource is gradually being transformed into a real maintenance library, which allows all stakeholders to start on the same basis. Confusion and misunderstandings are avoided in order to gain efficiency: the service provider knows exactly what structure he is working in, he knows the production processes, knows which machines to work on, knows more about the work environment...

As a result, you save a lot of time and money. You see directly the work done and can quickly intervene on the potential difficulties that the service provider encounters before he makes a mistake. Thanks to all this monitoring, you can control the evolution of certain criteria on the machines and thus verify that they are not going to break down. The data entered gives you an overview of your machine park and helps you to anticipate potential breakdowns. From curative maintenance you can therefore move towards preventive maintenance and, again, achieve serious savings (time, financial, human, etc.). With the help of these functionalities, the data entered as activities are carried out generate tables and other graphs, visible thanks to the analytical function present in Mobility Work, which make it possible to interpret the results and to better anticipate future breakdowns.

Trust your community

To try to alleviate all the concerns of businesses and alleviate the difficulties they may encounter, the new generation Mobility Work solution chose to focus on the community aspect. The application thus encourages exchange and mutual assistance so that each user and maintenance expert (more than 10,000 to date) can find the solutions they need.

For example, if you need to have an engine repaired and you do not have the necessary resources in your business at that moment, you can use the search bar, type in the keyword and see a whole list of specialized service providers scroll through. This list will gather information from all the provider files registered by community members. This is a solution with high added value for all companies looking for an external service provider.

To help you make your choice, rely on the ratings given to subcontractors. Indeed, after each service, users have the possibility to rate the providers according to the quality of the intervention and to post comments. This is a major argument for businesses, which often, as said earlier, have difficulty using the services of structures other than those with which they have become accustomed to working, willy-nilly.

The Mobility Work search engine allows you to find your equipment in one click, and to access the results of your network and the community

If you are still hesitant, know that the geolocation function, present in Mobility Work, will simplify your life. Because if you now know where the service providers are located thanks to the sheets filled in by the hundreds of technicians active in the application, your equipment is geolocated. In general, a service provider who arrives at your factory will not know anything about your work environment and will not necessarily know what exactly is the machine on which he must work. Thanks to the CMMS software, this is no longer a problem: the map available on the mobile version shows him the exact location of the equipment to be checked and he can intervene much more quickly. Again, these features are intended to make you more efficient.

Towards a longer-term vision

If we had to mention another major problem encountered by the industrial maintenance sector, we should mention the example of temporary employment agencies that encounter serious difficulties in recruiting. Through community, intuitive and new generation tools such as Mobility Work, these structures would have the opportunity to benefit from a real network of professionals, which puts maintenance experts in direct contact.

We are witnessing a real revolution since all services work with each other and are committed to achieving the same objective. Again, this more open working model where people could freely move from one structure to another and choose who they want to work with would make perfect sense.

This approach is part of a gradual evolution of mentalities : maintenance professionals are becoming more independent day after day and work with the contacts they have chosen based on the opinion of other users. In today's world, people are getting into the habit of connecting with each other and working hand in hand: industrial maintenance must absolutely be part of this model in order to be modernized.

In short, industrial maintenance faces a world full of possibilities thanks, in particular, to intuitive CMMS solutions from Industry 4.0 such as Mobility Work. On our platform, you will find a very wide range of solutions, both from consulting firms and curative maintenance companies.

The service provider, for its part, is already convinced, as evidenced by Louis Delahaye, project manager at Lormatech (a company acting as a service provider to companies to help them optimize their performance): “Mobility Work is simpler and faster to set up than other CMMS software. It is fun to use and is very user-friendly: all generations can get started very quickly. You immediately feel at ease, you quickly get used to it.” If you want to be listed in our catalog of official service providers, do not hesitate to contact us to discuss it!

To discover our new generation and intuitive maintenance application, benefit from the help of an entire community and simplify your daily life as well as that of your technicians, watch our presentation video and test our tool for free!