Maintenance communities are both a concept and a practice that are being developed thanks to next-gen CMMS applications. They allow you to put in place a more humane and efficient industrial maintenance management.
Indeed, new technologies are becoming increasingly important in the business world in general and in the industrial sector in particular. It is crucial to take into account the human aspect of maintenance and knowledge and to put these technologies at the service of the people who use them.
People as the key player in industrial maintenance
The exponential development of new technologies over the past decades has allowed considerable productivity gains, sometimes regardless of the human factor. However, it remains the key factor of any productive organization, and particularly of maintenance management.
The engagement of the teams
This may seem obvious, but the engagement of the teams is essential to the implementation of a new tool and to its real effectiveness. Sadly, this aspect seems to have been forgotten by the designers of some CMMS software.
Indeed, the implementation of a new industrial maintenance solution is a long-term project, which requires a thoughtful change management in order to involve the teams. The practical use of the new solution has to appear as genuine progress, to gain the support of all. If the teams perceive those new tools as unnecessarily imposed, there is a good chance that they will hardly or not use them at all.
No CMMS software can replace humans
Moreover, as efficient as it is, no CMMS software can replace humans entirely. Of course, the installation of sensors, for example, is of precious help in the detection and identification of breakdowns and incidents. But the experience of a maintenance technician or machine user is just as valuable in spotting and anticipating malfunctions.
Promote communication to improve maintenance
This is why any CMMS software that aims to be efficient, promotes communication and in particular feedback and sharing of information. It starts with heightening awareness among all employees about the benefits of good communication, and using relevant tools to meet that goal.
Maintenance communities are one of the best solutions to achieve this goal. They allow information sharing and multidirectional communication through which stakeholder can obtain and transmit all the information necessary to carry out their tasks.
Maintenance communities: technology assisting human
Thanks to the community-based CMMS solution offered by Mobility Work, maintenance communities enable the exchange of information between professionals who promote their performance.
The first community-based CMMS software
Mobility Work is the first community-based CMMS application. In addition to many features, users have access to a social network for maintenance and can follow their factory’s newsfeed.
Depending on the chosen parameters, this network also takes the form of chat or information sharing groups which can either:
- be internal to the maintenance team, the plant or the industrial group;
- bring together maintenance managers and suppliers or service providers;
- be open to the entire Mobility Work community.
Improve communication within your factory
The establishment of maintenance communities through a community-based CMMS helps improving communication within the maintenance teams but also within the plant as a whole, between different departments (production, sales, etc.). It helps avoiding repair delays or repeated replacements of the same part. It is also a factor in reducing incidents, which are often due to a lack of communication, that can lead to difficulties in collaborating or obtaining validations between different departments.
With Mobility Work, information is centralized within one single tool. It is common to all employees that are directly or indirectly involved in the maintenance management, and is easily accessible to all.
Communicate effortlessly with your suppliers thanks to Mobility Work Hub
Mobility Work Hub is a supplier platform that is built-in the community-based CMMS. It brings together, within a common base, products and services offered by suppliers who are members of the Mobility Work network, and all the accompanying documentation (safety instructions, technical documentation).
This catalog is accessible to all users of the CMMS platform and provides them with a wide range of products. This gives them more possibilities to meet all their needs, even the most specific ones. It represents an asset in the fight against the obsolescence of machines, because it is regularly updated and includes professionals who know how to adapt to the current challenges of maintenance.
In addition, this platform allows its users to easily communicate with the suppliers with whom they work, in particular through the chat and email functions. They can thus, in real time, ask questions or request additional information or advice for an optimized machine maintenance. They can also give product feedback, to help improving the design of the equipment in the framework of a lasting and constructive customer/supplier relationship.
By fostering communication between partners, maintenance communities encourage a supporting professional relationship that promotes the efficiency and relevance of maintenance management, from the most common intervention to the overall strategy.
Share your experiences with the maintenance communities
The Mobility Work community-based CMMS offers the possibility to all professionals, through maintenance communities, to share their experiences, whether they are about global strategic reflections or difficulties concerning a particular machine.
The programming functions of the app make it possible for the user to set the status of the equipment to “public”, to choose the level of confidentiality and to anonymize data. In return, the user can also consult the maintenance history of equivalent equipment and thus benefit from feedback from the entire community.
With more than a million pieces of equipment registered and nearly seven million hours of maintenance, this collective database represents considerable knowledge that offers each user the resources to optimize the maintenance of their machines.
Humans remain the central players in industrial maintenance in most factories. Any technological advance must therefore be at the service of their activity, gain their support and improve the quality of their work. Maintenance communities are, in this sense, a major asset, as they facilitate communication and information sharing between all those involved, whether they operate within the factory or as business partners. They thus solve one of the main obstacles to a smooth and optimized management of industrial maintenance.
