CMMS, SMBs and Industrial maintenance
On January 5-8, the Mobility Work team flew to Las Vegas to attend the CES 2017, the world’s gathering place for all who thrive on the business of consumer technologies. Many French startups came to represent the French Tech network, including Mobility Work, the next-gen CMMS and first maintenance social network. This event was a success for the startup, which had the opportunity to meet several potential clients from different industries, and to introduce them to the Mobility Work’s collaborative and user-friendly CMMS tool.
Startups have been booming for the past few years, which increasingly caught the attention of SMBs and international groups from different sectors. Industrial maintenance should also expect new actors to emerge, who will offer better solutions, and will take advantage of all the opportunities provided by the technology available nowadays. According to many, startups have become major players in the transition towards tomorrow’s industry.
Industry digitization and growing competition, due to globalization, urge companies to question their functioning, to reevaluate their strategy or to renew their activities. There are two goals at stake here: they need to maintain their leadership while taking advantage of all the growth opportunities offered by this period of transition.
Big businesses are increasingly working with innovative startups. Startups do not deal with any hierarchical or administrative issues or constraints unlike big businesses; that is why they can afford to be more agile (Scrum method), they cultivate special customer relationships, and they are extremely flexible regarding their deployment. We are talking about a virtuous circle: startups bring fresh new ideas, as well as flexibility, and big businesses offer financial and personal support, they help them developing their talents and they take part in developing local and national economies.
This is how Mobility Work, the next-gen maintenance software, was created. The idea of the first online community dedicated to industrial maintenance came about in FMGC plant in Brittany in France (a foundry, subsidiary of the French material transformation specialist Farinia Group); and thanks to the group and its CEO Frederic Guinot’s operational and financial support, the next-gen CMMS Mobility Work officially became a startup in May 2016.
Although collaborations between startups and big businesses are more common, SMBs are also part of this new collaboration system. Collaborations between startups and SMBs are not as common, since most SMBs are quite reticent when it comes to financing projects or taking risks. However, an increasing number of SMBs are now working with startups, since they face the same issues as big businesses (innovation, competition).
Although startups and SMEs are often compared, they are actually different and complement each other. Their collaboration may help them capitalizing on each other’s strengths:
- For SMEs: startups are a good alternative to the implementation of an R&D service, which implies financial and competitive advantages. Startups have plenty of innovative ideas, and represent a new flexible, dynamic and optimistic corporate culture;
- For the startups: they benefit from the SME’s financial resources, network, experience, and development solutions.
Mobility Work, which came about in a SMB, has already been implemented in several companies of different sizes and workforces. This next-gen maintenance tool is user-friendly, community based and analytic, and it enables companies of all sizes, from SMBs to big businesses, to successfully digitize their industrial maintenance team. Our development team works every day using agile methods, stand ups and scrums. Features are updated once a week to keep the tool up to date in order to comply with the clients’ needs.
All news related to ongoing interventions are available from Mobility Work mobile application’s newsfeed, available on iOS and Android.
The Mobility Work team, next-gen maintenance management software, would like to thank all the maintenance teams as well as the managers from FMGC and Farinia Group for their trust since the beginning, as well as our different partners for their constant support, and of course, the members and users of the community for being part of the first collaborative CMMS dedicated to industrial maintenance.