Organise your Maintenance
A good work plan of action has always been a priority in companies and more particularly for maintenance companies.
How to track your maintenance tasks and interventions online?
A good work plan of action has always been a priority in companies and more particularly for maintenance companies.
According to the 6 Sigma method, a successful organisation has a direct impact on turnover renewal, up to 10% less cost for the most efficient and ultimately better productivity for the company's technicians.
Over the years, many different ways of organising tasks and interventions have been developed for maintenance technicians.
Therefore, your priority will be to implement processes to improve in order to achieve your objectives efficiently and without wasting time.
This article discusses the pros and cons of excel files, gmao, Google calendar reminders, notebooks, and the new collaborative tools that are shaping a new way of working online.
1 - Historical methods
Long before the arrival of digital technology in business, organisational problems were already a concern for company directors.
The quality of service provided to customers has always been a priority in order to perpetuate and optimise the business. From the outset, it has been necessary to monitor tasks in order to measure the effectiveness of the work carried out, analyse it and then define action plans with customers or principals.
Notebooks were and still are used by many managers to keep track of the tasks and interventions of maintenance technicians. In the case of a preventive maintenance plan, the scheduling of tasks is also done on paper diaries or tables in order to list the interventions and schedule them in time. The reporting of the intervention can also be done on paper or in excel files by the technicians.
Unfortunately, the paper format has its limits and is abandoned over time by companies.It is getting more and more complicated to transmit information with paper as its format is not a great shared communication tool.
In the case of critical maintenance interventions, data security is more difficult to ensure and paper does not allow for intelligent reminders at the right time.
Technician reports on paper are also laborious to understand in some cases, as each technician has his or her own way of expressing information.It would then be an additional task to sort out the feedback from several technicians.
Finally, data analysis is quite complicated when several different notebooks and diaries have to be compiled in one format.
2 - The emergence of digital technology
With the arrival of digital technology and the democratisation of computer use in companies, new tools and software have appeared to manage interventions and reports for maintenance technicians.
The number one tool that comes to mind when we talk about the computer-based organisation is obviously the Excel spreadsheet.Working as an extension of the notebook, it has seduced many companies for its ease of use and the possibility of compiling data easily in order to make reports. Sometimes coupled with another tool such as google agenda in order to schedule interventions, it has made it possible to manage the interventions of companies.
Unfortunately, the complexity of using it on the move for technicians who have always used the paper format for reports on interventions has demonstrated the limits of this tool.
The difficulty of transmitting information in real time highlights the limits of the Excel spreadsheet.In order to fill some of these gaps, several software developers have developed CMMS specialised in maintenance.
The management, planning, and equipment monitoring have been greatly improved by CMMS software specialised in maintenance.
However, the problem of mobile data access via mobile formats has not been solved by CMMS, which continues to create problems in optimising team communication.
Very few CMMS are available in mobile format and even fewer in collaborative information sharing mode. Teams are often away from the office and have to return to the office to report on operations (= waste of time).
Moreover, as this software is quite heavy, the company must provide user training, which can be quite costly, time-consuming, and a potential additional cost to a fairly expensive tool.
3 - The online collaborative platform
With the aim of making the maintenance and service professions more user-friendly and simple, new start-ups such as Urbest have developed collaborative tools to make up for all the shortcomings of their predecessors.As digital technology is now well established in our everyday life and as "mobile applications" are more and more present, innovative solutions have to be found to adapt it to the working world.
An application such as Urbest for the management of interventions and the planning of maintenance plans, available on computers, tablets, and mobiles, allows the workload of field teams to be structured.
This considerable development makes it easier to communicate in real time with technicians online. The collaborative aspect, i.e. the sharing of contextualised information so that each person only sees what is necessary, saves a lot of time in preparing or following up tasks.
Collaboration and mobility allow us to move towards precise and quantified reporting, shared planned interventions, preventive maintenance actions with notifications at the right time, or even regulatory controls thanks to intuitive checklists.
Urbest is a plug-and-play tool easy to configure and cheapest than a classic CMMS.
The ease of use will also save you training costs for your field teams and your objectives will be achieved quicker.Finally, we have seen in this article a retrospective of tools and processes (with their qualities and defects) to manage and organise your maintenance.
During all these periods, many companies have failed to survive by adopting new ways of working too late.The work plan of action has a direct impact on the financial health of your organisation and its ability to pay good salaries.
It is therefore in your interest to adapt yourself quicker than your competitors.
If you have any questions regarding the article or need more information please contact hugo@urbest.io