Why mobile CMMS are the future of maintenance

There are more and more applications in our daily lives, but they are also spreading in industrial activities. Initially restricted to certain specific tasks, they now make it possible to manage entire sectors of a factory's activity. This is the case of mobile CMMS applications that have appeared in recent years. These, through their practical specificities and their technological power, certainly represent the future of industrial maintenance.

The spread of mobile applications in the world of industry

For several years, professional mobile applications have multiplied. While industry was not the first sector to join this movement, it is now fully affected by this evolution.

After services, industry

Initially, the use of mobile applications was mainly concerned with individual consumers. Then professional applications were created, and were very successful in certain sectors.

It is in the commercial function that these mobile applications have spread the most quickly. Solutions often derived from CRM platforms, allowing rapid order taking or responding to customer requests in real time, and in connection with the company's ERP, have thus become widespread.

These solutions are the simplest to implement, and they offer immediate benefits: the productivity of salespeople is increased, as is the quality of customer service. But technological progress and the investments of some companies have allowed the emergence of more elaborate professional mobile applications, and made possible their adoption and dissemination in the industrial sector.

The reasons for the success of professional mobile applications

In industry, two types of functions in particular have benefited from the arrival of mobile applications: on-site maintenance and warehouse management.

In general, the success of applications in the world of maintenance has been based on their ease of use, accessibility and mobility. Thanks to them, each operator has all the information he needs to perform his tasks at any time and in a few movements of his finger, using a tablet or smartphone.

More agile, lighter and easier to use, these mobile terminals are actually replacing laptops, which themselves already represented a great advance in terms of mobility and data storage.

Significant productivity gains

Thanks to gains in accessibility and mobility, the use of these new tools (terminals and mobile applications) has allowed substantial productivity gains that could reach 31% in France, according to a report commissioned by Panasonic (Tablets and the European Productivity Revolution).

But when it comes to maintenance and inventory management, the first applications only concerned certain specific aspects of these activities. In recent years, a new generation of mobile applications has emerged which, like Mobility Work, take care of the CMMS as a whole.

How mobile CMMS applications are revolutionizing maintenance management

Les Mobile CMMS apps Represent a small revolution, as they integrate all the functions necessary for the management of maintenance and associated stocks while offering agility, mobility and analytical power unequalled until now.

Manage all maintenance activities using mobile CMMS applications

Until recently, applications dedicated to maintenance or Inventory management concerned only certain aspects of these activities. But solutions such as Mobility Work have emerged, which make it possible to manage all maintenance and Spare parts stocks from a single application.

They thus integrate numerous functionalities that are already existing (bar code or NFC chip readings, geolocation, etc.) or new ones (analysis by Big Data, community operation) to offer a global management tool for industrial maintenance.

Mobile CMMS in practice

An application of Mobile CMMS Integral like Mobility Work offers numerous practical advantages for its users. For example, during an intervention, a maintenance technician, to be effective, must have all the information concerning the equipment to be maintained that is in front of him. He must be able to identify the assembly, the subassembly and the part, then access the maintenance methods corresponding to this machine, the stocks of spare parts, the history of interventions, etc. With a mobile application, he has access to all this information in real time on a simple connected tablet.

And this example applies to all people involved in maintenance management: team manager, inventory manager, schedule manager, etc. Information can be consulted and shared in real time, which allows significant progress both in terms of reliability and adaptability of interventions but also in productivity, thanks to numerous time savings in particular.

The conditions for an effective mobile CMMS

To be completely effective, the Mobile CMMS solutions must meet certain requirements. It is therefore important that they can communicate transparently and in real time. With the Company Information System (ERP, PLM,...).

In addition, they must be easily configurable by maintenance management managers, so that the exchanges of each type of information take place between all the persons indicated and only between these persons.

The challenges of digital maintenance

Beyond the immediate practical advantages, which are numerous, the use of the latest generation mobile applications for CMMS corresponds to wider challenges.

The instantaneity of data

The instantaneity of data sharing is today one of the key challenges of industrial activities. Digital industrial maintenance is based on the automatic collection of data on various equipment and machines. These are then broadcast in real time to all the actors concerned. This instantaneity allows substantial gains in reactivity and therefore in productivity, in particular by maintaining a high equipment utilization rate. And the higher the quantity and quality of the data collected, the greater these gains.

The massification of data

Data collection, processing and analysis have benefited from significant technological advances in recent years thanks to Big Data. Les Mobile CMMS apps As Mobility Work imports these advances in the field of maintenance.

The massification of data and the ability to analyze them effectively is a crucial issue in industrial maintenance. By integrating Big Data into CMMS, new mobile applications make it possible to build up valuable archives, to identify similar situations and to rely on a very vast history of interventions and situations in order to find the best solution to the problem to be solved at a given moment.

Find an analytics tool in Mobility Work CMMS to analyze all your maintenance data and adapt your strategy

This massification of data and the resulting power of analysis thus makes it possible, in fine, to implement a strategy of Predictive maintenance, which represents the future of industrial maintenance. Numerous interventions can therefore be planned and anticipated and no longer undergone, and others programmed intelligently rather than regularly and rigidly, thanks to the numerous data collected not only on site but throughout the industrial group and even beyond.

Digital Maintenance and the Human

Finally, the relationships between new technological tools and their human users are an issue that should not be overlooked. We know that the more a technology is perceived as easy to use, the more it will be adopted by a team.

On this point, the applications of Mobile CMMS Represent a major advance compared to the old maintenance management solutions, because they were precisely designed to facilitate the task of teams in practice and thus arouse their full support. Mobility Work, for example, has optimal ergonomics that allows each employee to take full advantage of it, in particular thanks to the tool's customization options.

Moreover, this solution is very agile and participative. It therefore promotes cooperation, networking and the sharing of information. These characteristics make it possible to nourish reflections and to make the most of each person's qualities and skills. Digitalization then appears to be one of the foundations of participatory management.

The applications of Mobile CMMS Which have emerged in recent years have numerous practical as well as economic and, more generally, human advantages. But, above all, they are part of the global movement to digitalize industry and the development ofInternet of Things (IoT), which undoubtedly represents the future of all productive activities. In that, they are the future of maintenance.