CMMS, a self-maintenance tool at the service of employee safety

While the use of traditional CMMS software is reserved for experienced and specifically trained maintenance teams, a next-generation solution like Mobility Work is easily accessible to all employees of a company. This characteristic makes it possible to develop self-maintenance and thus improve the safety of employees, including temporary or seasonal workers.

To better understand the role that an intuitive CMMS solution can play in improving the safety of employees and reducing the number of accidents at work, we met Morgane Caprais, student and work-study student in Master “Human Resources Manager” at ESCAM in Brest and author of a dissertation entitled”The importance of developing employee skills on the social climate of an agri-food company”.

Questioning about The role of skills development in the reduction of workplace accidents and on its impact on a company's productivity, Morgane Caprais identified Mobility Work CMMS as a tool to both improve the safety of employees, especially newcomers, and to promote their development of skills inself-maintenance production tools.

The negative consequences of the lack of self-maintenance

“From the beginning of my work-study period as an HR assistant in an agri-food company, I noticed that workplace accidents were relatively frequent and often involved temporary or seasonal employees. While wondering about the causes of these accidents, I noticed in particular that employees were quickly trained when they joined the company, but that there were very few recalls afterwards. Therefore, they did not know how to properly use and maintain their work tools. In addition, a clear procedural guide was missing.

Thus, employees devoted themselves to specific tasks, but did not know what to do in the event of a problem with the machine they were working on. Therefore, all the malfunctions on the production tools took time to be resolved because the maintenance teams took some time to intervene. This frequently resulted in production line shutdowns.”

The limits of maintenance without CMMS

“I also noticed that the maintenance department lacked organization and was struggling to meet the real needs of production teams. For example, each maintenance technician had specific tasks to perform but rarely went around the equipment to ensure that it was working properly.

Access your mobile CMMS from your smartphone

In general, a structured framework for maintenance was missing : for example, production teams did not know how to intervene on their machines in case of problems or how to communicate with the maintenance department to receive help. In addition, maintenance monitoring was mainly done with paper sheets stored in a workbook, and a summary Excel table.

The company understood that this organization did not meet the needs of the field, and they trained production operators in maintenance to improve things, but that is not enough.”

CMMS at the service of self-maintenance

“To provide concrete and efficient solutions to the needs of the company, I looked for new tools. My aim was to find ways to improve both the safety of each employee and the productivity of the company.

Regarding maintenance, I wanted to find a tool that was easy to use, in particular so that temporary and seasonal workers could use it easily, but also to make production personnel aware of self-maintenance.

By making it possible to formalize procedures and make them easily accessible on any digital device, an application like Mobility Work allows employees to be more focused on their work but also more involved and more motivated, because they can participate themselves in the proper functioning and maintenance of their work tools, without depending on the maintenance department, especially when it is not fully operational.

Consult maintenance checklists in your CMMS

A new generation CMMS is also a training tool, since it allows newcomers to quickly learn good self-maintenance practices and procedures to follow, and to continue training afterwards. From the point of view of skills development, this is an interesting aspect.

In the same field, The community side of the application also caught my attention: by giving each user the opportunity to exchange with other professionals, this also promotes the development of employee skills.”

Adopting a CMMS to improve employee safety

“In my opinion, the implementation of an efficient CMMS makes it possible to take into account specific working conditions and the arduousness of work by facilitating the tasks of both maintenance technicians and production teams.

In addition, it is a response to the obligation placed on employers in the Labour Code to take all necessary measures to guarantee the safety and health of their employees. A CMMS like Mobility Work thus promotes respect for the principles of prevention that make it possible to: limit professional risks.

To meet my company's desire to improve compliance and communication within production units, I therefore recommended the adoption of this CMMS solution.”