CMMS: Mobility Work at Axéréal

The French group Axéréal, whose activity focuses mainly on the Center-Val-de-Loire region, is the first French cereal cooperative and has no less than 13,000 member farmers.

The branch Axereal Livestock of the group focuses on four main specialties: animal nutrition, hatching, production organization and livestock buildings and equipment.

Can you introduce yourself in a few words?

My name is David Debert and I am an industrial director at Axéréal Élevage. I am in charge of managing the operating part, from factories to delivery, including customer relationship service, planning, scheduling... Therefore, I have maintenance in my area of responsibility.

How did you hear about Mobility Work?

I saw various publications on the professional social network LinkedIn about Mobility Work CMMS and I searched the internet to find more information. A little later, by chance, I met a person who had already tried Mobility Work and was quite satisfied with it. It was through word of mouth that things started.

What convinced you to test the product?

The desire to make a product simple and accessible to a majority of users. This is what I really expected, since no one in my teams is particularly comfortable with digital tools or is directly specialized in deploying maintenance management software. Of course, these teams include maintenance managers who work on the machines, but none of them manage a large team or spend their days planning the activities of technicians. The teams are relatively small, so I need the maintenance manager to spend more time in the field and on our tools rather than in front of a computer. This is exactly what Mobility Work allowed: that's why I wanted to test the tool.

Then, I would say that my research on Mobility Work was motivated by the fact that we had a real desire to set up a CMMS. For some time now, we had not found a satisfactory tool and therefore had nothing to lose by testing this application, except perhaps some time. Precisely that time, we did not waste it since it turned out that the tool met the expectations of a majority of the people who tried it. Now we have to finish taking it in hand.

Before deployment, we used the Office suite to manage our industrial maintenance: preventive maintenance plans and inventory monitoring on Excel, machine data sheets on Word... We did not have real monitoring of the curative.

How long has CMMS been in place?

At Axéréal Éveil, we started testing CMMS in December 2017, initially on a single site. We then really deployed its implementation from April 2018 in this same factory and today, the tool is used on four production sites. Keep in mind that we have ten sites in total, and that the four that work with Mobility Work were chosen based on their progress in monitoring maintenance. Within a year, we plan to deploy CMMS on two additional sites. As for the remaining sites, the tool will, I think, be installed there within two to three years.

What are the advantages of Mobility Work in your opinion?

The main advantage is the real ease of use of the tool for the uninitiated: the basic information remains very accessible. The use of mobile support, whether from a tablet or a telephone, is a real and major advantage for people who have difficulties with the computer tool. This avoids spending too much time in front of a screen, from having to type on a keyboard: now you can directly use the microphone on the Google keyboard and it is very quick to use.

All the news relating to ongoing interventions are available from the news feed of the Mobility Work mobile application, available on iOS and Android.

Beyond that, whether for me, maintenance managers or site managers who feel a little more comfortable with the IT tool, Mobility Work CMMS allows us to obtain real indicators concerning the curative, which we could not monitor effectively before. The tool gives us the possibility to monitor the progress of preventive maintenance to know if we are on time or not, to obtain maintenance indicators and to be able to work on optimizing maintenance.

In the end, there are two real components: first, an aspect dedicated to people who are not necessarily at ease and who, in my opinion, would have had difficulties with another maintenance management system, and another more focused on analysis and optimization, which is just as present and effective as on other CMMS systems.

What is the feature that you use the most?

We chose to implement NFC chips: I think that teams would have a lot of trouble doing without them today. There are still some malfunctions in the application when a technician wants to scan a chip, but this feature has become essential.

I would also simply mention mobile integration, which is a real asset: it's fast, technicians have the tool on them, they can take photos, they no longer need to go back to the office, the plans of the machine as well as the safety documents are directly available on the phone if necessary... Everything is once again simple and fast, all these functionalities represent a real time-saver.

What functionality does not yet exist would you like to have?

We would like the full integration of NFC supports to be achieved, since it works perfectly with the browser but still needs to be improved on the mobile version.

I also spoke directly with the Mobility Work team in order to give us the possibility of managing stocks on a multi-site store, which would be accessible on one or all of the entity's sites. Our request has been taken into account and should be developed soon.

What are your company's future projects?

As I said earlier, we are planning to integrate the maintenance management tool on two additional sites. At the same time, we are wondering about a potential integration of the truck fleet, since part of the transport is integrated here. This would allow us to have a digital follow-up of truck maintenance.

The calendar feature offered by Mobility Work allows you to plan all your preventive and predictive maintenance interventions.

We want to make even more progress on the analysis and optimization of preventive measures, it is a still young project that only started to be implemented last April, the real use of Mobility Work having become effective in June. I think that after several more months of use we will have a much better overview.

Are you satisfied with the responsiveness of the Mobility Work team?

Of course, given that we live in a world in constant motion, we always want to be more responsive. However, we remain aware that we need to take a step back and admit that we are clearly quite satisfied with the responsiveness of the Mobility Work team, whether via online support or via email or telephone exchanges.

It's quite dynamic and I think that the Mobility Work project benefits from a team that loves what they do, which is therefore dynamic and motivated to constantly make things happen. This allows us to quickly and effectively discuss the problems we encounter, and possibly to develop solutions if we are not the only ones to suggest them.

I think that one of the strengths of Mobility Work today is being able to modify and advance on the software to adapt it: it's a lot of work, of course, but that's what makes the product live compared to other CMMS. For now, the team is meeting our expectations!

Thanks to Mr. Debert for agreeing to give his testimony. User feedback is at the heart of our approach and helps us improve our product on a daily basis.