The maintenance and upkeep of wastewater treatment plants is an important issue for communities of municipalities or agglomerations. If CMMS is a particularly valuable tool to manage these activities, it is important to choose a software that will win over the maintenance agents and technicians so that they use it on a daily basis.
Jérôme Turnaco, Maintenance Manager at the Communauté d’agglomération du Pays Basque (Basque Country Agglomeration Community), an intercommunal structure in southwestern France which includes 158 cities, explains why he has been using Mobility Work for more than 2 years, after having encountered difficulties with other solutions.
What do you do?
As far as I am concerned, I am in charge of the maintenance division in 3 wastewater treatment plants, which include about 100 sites. We supervise the production and treatment of water.
Our maintenance department counts with 7 technicians, who all use Mobility Work. We also have an operations department and a network cleaning department that also use the application for operating and driving equipment.
What is your experience with CMMS?
For years, we have been using an in-house application, which has shown its limitations.
We then bought the CMMS software from a major software publisher. But we encountered a big issue: maintenance technicians and operators from other departments were not at all familiar with the software, which was too complex and too heavy for what we needed.
“Mobility Work is very visual, and very easy handle.”
At some point, the question arose whether to continue or to switch to another solution. The agents told me that it was very heavy, that it wasn’t user-friendly enough, that it took 50 clicks to create a task, that you had to remember to check this or that box… So we never used it fully. That’s when I started to do some research and discovered Mobility Work.
Why did you choose Mobility Work CMMS?
Our need was the follow-up of our equipment and the tasks carried out and to be carried out, and the scheduling and implementation of regulatory controls, which are numerous in our company: lifting, electrical, safety, etc.
Towards the end of 2019, I started the free trial period during which I created about 40 equipment, and then we tested the application for a few weeks. The technicians were quick to adhere to the solution, so we opted to switch to Mobility Work, taking out about 10 licenses. The transition to Mobility Work went smooth, since it is very user-friendly and easy to handle.
Today we have 16 licenses and we should reach 29 at the end of the month. As for the security, our IT department validated very quickly the choice of Mobility Work.
How many equipment do you manage with Mobility Work?
I have created 2 networks: a “wastewater” network and a “drinking water” network. Today, there are 1300 equipments on the “wastewater” network.
On the “drinking water” network, which has about 250 equipment, we will try to scale up with Mobility Work during the year 2022.
Corrective-curative or preventive?
We carry out a lot of curative work, which represents approximately 80% of our activity, with declarations of breakdowns for example. Operating services send them directly to us in Mobility Work, it is very practical.
“Our operations department manages daily maintenance through the application’s maintenance plans.”
But we also do some preventive work on critical equipment. For example, our operations department, which manages the operating processes, takes care of cleaning the probes, sensors on the stations, etc. They use Mobility Work to carry out maintenance plans and manage routine maintenance on these equipment. They use Mobility Work to manage maintenance plans and routine interventions on these equipment.
We also have a hydro-cleaner truck which passes on all the stations and whose activity we manage thanks to a maintenance plan in Mobility Work.
What features do you use the most?
As I said, the breakdown declarations, with the creation of tasks. The agents also use the calendar a lot, so they know what they have to do every day.
We also use the mobile application a lot, since we work on several sites.
The Mobility Work calendar on your smartphone
Any particular projects related to Mobility Work in the near future?
Today we would like to extend the use of the application to the water production department: that they declare breakdowns, that they use it for regulatory controls, etc.
I’d also like to connect our purchase order application with Mobility Work, especially to track the spare parts costs associated with each piece of equipment and evaluate whether or not it should be replaced.
In addition, our IT department is looking at how to connect Mobility Work with our own data processing systems so that we can retrieve the data for each piece of equipment and see it in the application’s dashboard. That’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 presenting his use of the Mobility Work CMMS application!
