Maintenance and interconnectivity of services: the advantages of CMMS

GMAO: Maintenance and liaison of company services

How to rethink industrial maintenance software (CMMS) to place the concept of community as well as access to information at the heart of the company?

For more than ten years, each business department has been using its own software, both to manage computer requests on ticketing software and for environmental controls on an Excel file, tool management in an Access database or even production on paper. At the same time, computer-aided maintenance management software, or CMMS, has gradually emerged in companies to become essential tools for their proper functioning.

This model, while it has been able to simplify many things in companies, has disadvantages that can, in the long run, have quite disastrous consequences on their operation: communication losses and faults, lack of standardization, etc. Industrial maintenance management tools as we know them are also often the cause of misunderstanding between employees, who cannot directly follow the tasks carried out by their colleagues and are more likely to make mistakes. Fortunately, businesses have gradually seen the emergence of more collaborative tools supported by Industry 4.0, developed on the model of social networks and focused on the concept of community.

This is the path that has been followed Mobility Work by developing its new generation industrial maintenance management platform, which gives its customers the opportunity to innovate and place information at the heart of their business. The application allows a system that is more centralized and accessible to all, very easy to use.

How to connect the activity of different services?

Over the past 20 years, maintenance personnel used to enter information into asset management software that was then difficult to retrieve. As a result, the activity of technicians could be slowed down and faults could multiply quite quickly. Today, thanks to the simple, intuitive user interface and the sleek graphics of the Mobility Work application, information entry is considerably simplified: a technician can, in a few seconds and without leaving his station, use voice control to enter information into the software. He no longer has to waste ten minutes trying to save data on a fixed workstation in his office, and trying to find his way around an endless tangle of features with an unintuitive design.

Mobility Work CMMS is built around a community of users, who exchange and follow news from their factory thanks to the news feed

If technicians tended to take a dim view of data entry operations in maintenance management software, which they perceived more as tools allowing management or their manager to monitor their every move, they were quickly reassured. Mobility Work simplifies teamwork and industrial maintenance, and encourages collaborative work within the same department: each employee can quickly know where their colleague is in the progress of their tasks, and the manager follows the work of his team and can intervene quickly if necessary.

The need for interconnectivity is explained by the fact that the action of all departments in a company must be coordinated for the activity to progress. These services, such as maintenance, production, accounting or even purchasing, thus have the possibility of monitoring and being more reactive. The Mobility Work application even offers different profiles according to the needs of each person; thus, the “production technician” profile allows them in particular to formulate maintenance requests for free.

The concept of community at the heart of Mobility Work

One of the many other advantages of Mobility Work is that the application facilitates the retrieval of information. In other words, each entry and intervention by a user allows other technicians to instantly obtain answers to their questions and to move forward with their tasks. To see more clearly, here are the two main technical possibilities that the application allows:

• the “Search” function, which allows a technician to search for a specific problem and quickly obtain a history of what was done by him or a colleague over a given period of time on a machine. He thus measures the value of entering these transactions: the objective is to save time in the event of a similar problem in the future.
• the news feed, which allows technicians to access company news in a few seconds: latest intervention requests, latest spare parts added, latest maintenance interventions, latest documents added... It is the life of the company that unfolds instantly, so that the technician can, in a few seconds, visualize all the operations carried out by his colleagues.

Companies thus note that this quantity of information is available in just a few clicks and that the activity of technicians is thus streamlined. Indeed, if the data entry tool is simple to use, it is precisely to allow the maximum amount of information to be collected, which will then be disseminated to all employees via the news feed, or even to the rest of the community if it is published in public.

These advantages illustrate perfectly. The concept of community that the Mobility Work CMMS tool is committed to promoting. Employees even benefit from a feature that allows them to add, directly into the application, the documents of their choice related to a task, equipment or problem encountered (plans, diagrams, warranty contracts, warranty contracts, manufacturer data, etc.). The information and documents downloaded are accessible via research, therefore gradually allowing the application to become the first real database entirely dedicated to industrial maintenance.

More intuitive features at the service of the user

Our maintenance application uses all the functionalities of a classic CMMS (maintenance planning, equipment creation, inventory management, etc.) with the difference that it is deeply distinguished by its ease of use and its precursor nature, breaking with software that was too dense and too demanding in terms of input, which complicated the management of industrial maintenance.

With Mobility Work CMMS software, maintenance teams organize their working day using the calendar.

Our innovation is based on the observation that we have drawn up on the basis of these classic CMMAs: they choose to set up mask systems allowing users to modify their screens according to the type of profile, a rather archaic model in which they end up getting lost. Again, we were able to bounce back and adapt to offer a more intuitive user experience: with Mobility Work, these same users use a tag system, or labels. These act as labels to personalize a given information and to improve its visibility. It is then possible to tag a whole set of information relating to an equipment, an intervention, a technician... For example, an intervention with the “security” tag will allow any user who consults the news feed to visualize the nature of the operation in progress.

Machines are at the heart of your company's activity, so you must have tools at your fingertips to help you in the various fields of action: maintenance, production, new work, projects, quality, the environment... Therefore, the tag system allows our CMMS software to act as a real task management tool, accessible to all levels and services of your company.

Mobility Work, a resolutely revolutionary tool

To summarize, here are some examples of uses that Mobility Work can be used for: management of tools, safety operations, actions related to the environment (regulatory control, operations planning, etc.), projects, buildings and factory infrastructures, factory buildings and infrastructures, production requests, first-level maintenance...

The application not only guarantees better interconnectivity between departments but also a better coordination of the work of technicians in a single department, even if they are not in the same teams and are not likely to intersect. In short, it is an invaluable time saver, which allows the company to improve its production cycles and for everyone to participate in this process of continuous improvement.

To learn more about the possibilities of our Mobility Work CMMS software, do not hesitate to watch the video presentation of our application and to test the trial version in order to better understand all the advantages of this tool and to fully appreciate its innovative nature.