MonaBike public services, linked to Monaco’s national bus company, provides electric bike rentals throughout the Principality. With a fleet of nearly 300 bikes, the organization soon needed to find the right CMMS app to help it meet its daily challenges.
We spoke with Roland de Rechniewski, Operations Manager, who explained why he chose Mobility Work, a mobile and community-based CMMS app, and how the solution had gradually blended into the daily life of the structure. The company now employs five people (including three maintenance experts), all of whom use the SaaS application on a daily basis.
Mobility Work: “In which circumstances did the idea of deploying a CMMS solution emerge?
Roland de Rechniewski: We are now a public transport company, but we actually started as a bus company. In 2010, we set up our self-service electric bike system (similar to the one in the Paris area). The structure has evolved quickly, and we now have nearly 300 electric bikes, spread over 35 stations. However new possibilities also mean new issues: we had to do everything we could to ensure effective monitoring of this operation.
Today, the structure is attached to the bus activity but in the future, it will become a separate entity, in start-up mode. So what we were looking for was a solution that was easy to deploy, that didn’t require hours of training because, having already experienced it, it’s quite penalizing and above all boring. In this case, day-to-day users do not buy into the system.
“I have to admit that the way you present your solution and the fact that you have a community vision of maintenance rather appealed to us”
Read our guide to best adopt the maintenance management platform
In this context, we conducted our research on the Internet and discovered your solution. I admit that the way you present it and the fact that you have a community vision of maintenance, based on information sharing, eventually won us over.
What convinced you to test our maintenance management platform?
Quite quickly, I watched the videos you published, which explain your solution quite well and give a good overview of it. I contacted one of your sales representatives and within two days we were convinced to test it.
We started using your CMMS on September 16, 2019. From this day on, we prepared the import of our entire fleet and spare parts and everything was entered into the software.
As our job consists in monitoring both bikes and stations, we explained to our employees what was expected from them and what the purpose of the tool was. Today, we have more than 1,500 tasks and more than 1,250 hours of time spent … Which proves once again that we use it on a daily basis.
Based on your experience, how does our community-based CMMS meet your needs?
I attach great importance in ensuring that my teams spend as little time as possible entering information into their software. Since we manage all our maintenance tasks in the very room where the bikes are stored, where they are analyzed and overhauled, our technicians inevitably often do repetitive tasks that need to be documented. To meet this need, we have developed a specific keyboard that allows us, by pressing buttons, to automatically enter the description of an activity that is going to be saved in the dedicated field. This is a huge time-saver.
We have also set up a whole counter section, which we can track in our CMMS. Thanks to them, the teams know how long it takes for a bike to return, how many times it has been used and for how long… Therefore, thanks to your app we obtain quite accurate statistics on what we do and we can effectively track the bikes, repairs and maintenance carried out on them.
Mobility Work is provided with an analytic tool to help you analyze all your maintenance data and adapt your strategy
These are all things that have been made possible thanks, once again, to a software deployed without any training, and this is precisely what makes all the difference. This is the strength of Mobility Work. Besides, we are a small structure, which means that we don’t have an IT manager or a server to set up… So that was another argument.
It’s certain that we’re turning it into a kind of fleet management, which is by definition different from what the industrial sector would use Mobility Work CMMS for. But the application meets the needs of all sectors, and we easily adapted it to our own.
Was our maintenance management platform easily adopted by your team?
Today, the technicians are fully committed. And they also know very well that we don’t use the software to spy on them.
Our logic is straightforward and has been clearly explained to the team: in the short term, we would like to sell our working hours. In this logic, we need to know how much an hour costs in order to adapt our prices and continue to be profitable. So, the more information the teams enter into the CMMS solution, the more accurate and therefore the more competitive we are. We put the emphasis on the collaborative aspect, and it worked well.
What did you think of our team’s support?
Everything went very well. Within our business, everyone has a responsibility and the profiles are not always the same. We were able to talk to one of your sales representatives to define the position of one person in particular, in charge of the store.
As time went by, we overcame the few obstacles we had encountered, since some of them were bypassed in 15 days.
What are the organization’s future projects regarding the CMMS?
By the end of 2020, we aim to complete phase 2 of the deployment of the Principality of Monaco’s MonaBike electric bicycle system. 11 additional stations and more than 100 bikes will be added to the current fleet. Mobility Work will be fully assimilated by the maintenance team and we will be able to look forward to a new phase.
“I wanted to find a maintenance management solution that was easy to use, efficient and adopted by everyone. With your platform, we found what we were looking for.”
We have teams in charge of moving the bikes from one station to another, in order to balance the number of bikes everywhere and ensure fair access. These teams are not yet working with the Mobility Work platform, but we would like to extend the use of the software to other profiles to see how they would adapt to it.
My goal is to develop our structure to become a fully-fledged company in the short term. Therefore, I wanted to find a maintenance management solution that is easy to use, efficient, adopted by everyone and that can deliver information in terms of management to avoid us having to navigate by sight as much as possible. With your platform, we found what we were looking for since it meets our needs.
Any last word?
In the past, our maintenance was only done on paper. But once we had exceeded 100 electric bikes, it became imperative to digitize our practices to be able to multiply service by 4 and daily use by 10.
Read also: CMMS or Excel to manage maintenance?
One of the many benefits found is in slightly more critical situations, such as an accident. In these cases, the state of the vehicle (in our case the bicycle) will often be questioned. This has therefore an important safety aspect: your CMMS allows us to keep an exhaustive history of all interventions carried out on the bikes, it is easy for us to prove that maintenance and follow-up have been scrupulously carried out. Thanks to the tool, we obtain precise statistics on the rate of use or maintenance operations.
That’s precisely what matters to us: we sell reliability and have a constant goal of being faultless.”
Thank you very much to Mr. de Rechniewski for sharing his experience with the Mobility Work community maintenance management platform! If you want to read more user testimonials, follow us on our social networks!
