While the use of traditional CMMS software is reserved for experienced and specifically trained maintenance teams, a next-gen maintenance management solution like Mobility Work is easily accessible to all employees of a company. This feature allows to develop autonomous maintenance and to improve the safety of the employees, including the temporary or seasonal workers.
To better understand the role that an intuitive CMMS solution can play in improving employee safety and reducing the number of work-related accidents, we met with Morgane Caprais, a student and work-study student in the Master’s program “Human Resources Manager” at ESCAM in Brest and author of a dissertation entitled “The importance of developing employee skills on the social climate of a food processing company“.
Wondering about the role of skills development in reducing workplace accidents and its impact on a company’s productivity, Morgane identified Mobility Work CMMS as a tool that can both improve the safety of employees, especially new one, and promote their increased skills in the autonomous maintenance of production tools.
The negative consequences of the absence of autonomous maintenance
“From the beginning of my experience as an HR assistant in a food processing company, I noticed that work-related accidents were relatively frequent and often involved temporary or seasonal employees. When I asked myself about the causes of these accidents, I noticed that employees were quickly trained when they joined the company, but that there were very few reminders afterwards. They did not know how to use and maintain their work tools. In addition, there was a lack of clear procedural guidance.
As a result, employees were working on specific tasks, but did not know what to do if there was a problem with the machine they were working on. As a result, any malfunctions on the production tools took a long time to be solved because the maintenance teams were slow to respond. This frequently resulted in production line shutdowns.”
The limits of maintenance without a CMMS
“I also found that the maintenance department lacked organization and struggled to meet the real needs of the production teams. For example, each maintenance technician had specific tasks to perform but rarely went around the equipment to make sure it was working properly.
In general, there was a lack of a structured framework for maintenance: for example, the production teams did not know how to intervene on their machines in case of a problem or how to communicate with the maintenance department to receive help. In addition, maintenance follow-up was mainly done with paper sheets stored in a binder, and an Excel summary table.
The company realized that this organization was not meeting the needs of the field, and they trained production operators in maintenance to improve things, but that’s not enough.”
CMMS for autonomous maintenance
“To provide concrete and efficient solutions to the company’s needs, I looked for new tools. My objective was to find ways to improve both the safety of each employee and the productivity of the company.
Concerning maintenance, I wanted to find a tool that was easy to use, especially so that temporary and seasonal workers could use it easily, but also to raise awareness of autonomous maintenance among production staff.
By formalizing procedures and making them easily accessible on any digital device, an application like Mobility Work allows employees to be more focused on their work but also more involved and motivated, because they can participate themselves in the proper functioning and maintenance of their work tools, without depending on the maintenance department, especially when it is not fully operational.
Consult maintenance checklists in your CMMS
A next-gen CMMS is also an efficient training tool, since it allows new arrivals to quickly learn good maintenance practices and procedures to follow, and to continue training afterwards. From the point of view of skills development, this is an interesting aspect.
In the same area, the community aspect of the application also caught my attention: by giving each user the opportunity to exchange with other professionals, this again promotes the rise in skills of employees.”
Adopt a CMMS to improve employee safety
“In my opinion, the implementation of a high-performance CMMS makes it possible to take into account the specific working conditions and the arduousness of the work by facilitating the tasks of both maintenance technicians and production teams.
Moreover, it is an answer to the obligation made to the employers in the labor code to take all the necessary measures to guarantee the safety and the health of their employees. A CMMS like Mobility Work thus supports the respect of the principles of prevention which make it possible to limit the professional risks.
To meet my company’s desire to improve compliance and communication within the production unit, I therefore recommended the adoption of this CMMS solution.”
