What CMMS to manage the maintenance of wastewater treatment plants?

The maintenance and maintenance of wastewater treatment plants represent an important challenge for communities of municipalities or agglomeration. While CMMS is a particularly valuable tool for managing these activities, it is important to choose software that is supported by maintenance agents and technicians so that they can use it on a daily basis.

Jérôme Turnaco, Maintenance Manager at the Communauté d'agglomération du Pays Basque, explains to us why he has been using Mobility Work for more than 2 years, after having encountered difficulties with other solutions.

In what structure do you work?

We are a sanitation authority, within the Communauté d'agglomération du Pays Basque, which brings together 158 municipalities. We are divided into 7 sectors, in the form of public authorities or public service delegations. My agency, which corresponds to sector 2, mainly deals with the cities of Bayonne and Boucau.

What are your duties?

As far as I am concerned, I manage the maintenance division: in particular, I manage 3 treatment plants, which include a hundred sites. We supervise water production and treatment.

Our maintenance department has 7 technicians, all of whom use Mobility Work. We also have an operations department and a network cleaning service that also use the application, but no longer for operating and operating equipment tasks.

What is your experience with CMMS?

For years, we have used a homemade application, which has shown its limits.

We then bought the CMMS software from a major publisher. But we encountered a big problem: maintenance technicians and agents from other departments did not at all become familiar with the software, which was too complex and too heavy for what we needed.

“Mobility Work is very visual, and very easy to handle”

At some point, therefore, the question arose whether to continue or to move on to another solution. The agents told me that it was very cumbersome, that it was not graphic, that it took 50 clicks to create a task, that you should not forget to check this or that box... As a result, it has never been fully used.. It was there that I started doing research and discovered Mobility Work.

Easily create maintenance plans in the Mobility Work app

Why did you choose Mobility Work?

Our need was the monitoring of our equipment and the tasks carried out and to be carried out, and the scheduling and implementation of regulatory controls, which are numerous with us: lifting, electrical, safety, etc.

At the end of 2019, I started the free trial period during which I created about forty devices, then we tested the application for a few weeks. The technicians joined quickly, so we chose to switch to Mobility Work, taking out a dozen licenses.

The switch to Mobility Work went well, everyone joined : it is very visual, and very easy to handle. Today we have 16 licenses and we should increase to 29 at the end of the month.

As for security, our IT department quickly validated the choice of Mobility Work.

How much equipment do you manage with Mobility Work?

I have 2 networks : a “wastewater” network, and a “drinking water” network. Today, there are 1300 pieces of equipment on the “wastewater” network.

On the “drinking water” network, which includes around 250 pieces of equipment, we will try to increase our power with Mobility Work during the year 2022.

Rather corrective-curative or preventive?

We do quite a bit of curative work, which represents about 80% of our activity, with fault declarations for example. The operating departments send them directly to us in Mobility Work, which is very practical.

“Our operations department manages routine maintenance thanks to the application's maintenance plans”

But we also do a bit of preventive work on some sensitive machines. For example, our operations department, which manages the operating processes, takes care of cleaning the probes, the sensors on the stations, etc. They use Mobility Work to apply maintenance plans and manage the current maintenance on this equipment.

We also have a Sewage truck which applies to all workstations and whose activity we manage through a maintenance plan in Mobility Work.

What are the features that serve you the most?

As I was telling you, fault declarations, with the creation of tasks. Agents also use a lot of the Scheduling, thanks to which they know what to do every day.

We also use a lot ofMobile app, since we work on several sites.

The agenda of the Mobility Work application on smartphone

Specific projects with the Mobility Work application?

Today we would like to extend the use of the application to the water production service : that they report breakdowns, that they use them for regulatory checks, etc.

I would also like to connect our purchase order application with Mobility Work, in particular to track the spare parts costs associated with each piece of equipment and assess the relevance of replacing it or not.

In addition, our IT department is looking at how to connect Mobility Work with our own data processing systems in order to be able to retrieve the data concerning each equipment and see it in the application dashboard. It's something we're interested in anyway, but we don't want to be drowned in data either.

A big thank you to Mr. Turnaco for taking the time to answer our questions and for showing us his use of the Mobility Work CMMS application!