There are more and more applications in our daily life, but they are also spreading in industrial activities, just like mobile CMMS. Initially used for certain specific tasks, they now make it possible to manage entire areas of a factory’s activity.
This is the case with mobile CMMS applications that have emerged in recent years. These, through their practical specificities and their technological power, certainly represent the future of industrial maintenance.
Mobile applications are spreading across the industry’s world
For several years, professional mobile applications have multiplied. If industry was not the first sector to integrate this movement, it is now fully concerned by this development.
First services, then industry
The use of mobile applications initially mainly concerned individual consumers. Then professional applications have emerged, and have met with great success in certain sectors.
These mobile applications have spread the most quickly in the commercial function. Solutions often derived from CRM platforms, allowing rapid order taking or responding in real time to customer requests, in connection with the company’s ERP.
These solutions are the simplest to implement, and they offer immediate advantages: the productivity of sales representatives is increased, as is the quality of customer service. But technological progress and the investments of certain companies have allowed the emergence of more sophisticated professional mobile applications, and made their adoption and distribution in the industrial sector possible.
The reasons for the success of professional mobile applications
In the industrial sector, two types of functions in particular have benefited from the arrival of mobile applications: on-site maintenance and warehouse management.
Generally speaking, the success of applications in the maintenance sector has been based on their ease of use, accessibility and mobility. Thanks to them, each operator has at any time and with a few clicks all the information he needs to perform his tasks, using a tablet or a smartphone.
More agile, lighter and easier to use, these mobile devices are gradually replacing laptops, which themselves represented a great advance in terms of mobility and data storage.
Significant productivity gains
Thanks to improvements in accessibility and mobility, the use of these new tools (terminals and mobile applications) has enabled substantial productivity gains that could reach 31% in France, according to a report commissioned by Panasonic (Tablets and the European Productivity Revolution).
But in terms of maintenance and inventory management, the first applications concerned only a few specific aspects of these activities. In recent years, a new generation of mobile applications has emerged which, like Mobility Work, contain a whole CMMS.
How mobile CMMS applications are revolutionizing maintenance management
Mobile CMMS applications represent a small revolution, because they integrate all the functions necessary for the management of maintenance and associated stocks while offering unrivalled agility, mobility and analysis power.
Manage all maintenance activities using mobile CMMS applications
Until recently, applications dedicated to maintenance or inventory management only concerned certain aspects of these activities. But solutions like Mobility Work have emerged, making it possible to manage all maintenance and spare parts stocks from a single application.
They thus integrate many existing functionalities (barcode or NFC chips scanning, geolocation, etc.) or new ones (analysis by Big Data, community operation) in order to offer a global management tool for industrial maintenance.
Mobile CMMS in practice
A full mobile CMMS application like Mobility Work has many practical benefits for its users. For example, during an intervention: to be efficient, a maintenance technician must have all the information concerning the equipment that needs a maintenance intervention. He must be able to identify the set, the sub-set and the part, then access the maintenance methods corresponding to this machine, to the stocks of spare parts, to the intervention history, etc. With a mobile application, he has access to all this information in real time on a simple connected tablet.
And this example applies to all people involved in maintenance management: team manager, inventory manager, scheduling manager, etc. The information can be consulted and shared in real time, which allows clear progress both in terms of reliability and adaptability of interventions but also in productivity, thanks to numerous time savings.
The conditions for an efficient mobile CMMS
To be completely effective, mobile CMMS solutions must meet certain prerequisites. It is therefore important that they can communicate transparently and in real time with the company’s information system (ERP, PLM, etc.).
Moreover, they must be easily configurable by those responsible for maintenance management, so that the exchanges of each type of information can take place between the persons indicated and only between these persons.
The challenges of digital maintenance
Beyond the immediate practical advantages, which are numerous, the use of next-gen and mobile CMMS applications also focuses on broader issues.
Data immediacy
The instantaneous sharing of data is one of today’s key challenges for industrial activities. Digital industrial maintenance is based on the automatic collection of data on various equipment and machines. These are then broadcasted in real time to all the players involved. This instantaneousness leads to substantial gains in responsiveness and therefore to productivity, in particular by maintaining a high equipment utilization rate. And the higher the quantity and quality of the data collected is, the greater the gains will be.
Data massification
Collecting, processing and analyzing data has become easier thanks to significant technological advances in recent years thanks to Big Data. A mobile CMMS application like Mobility Work imports these advances in the field of maintenance.
The massification of data and the ability to analyze it efficiently is a crucial issue in industrial maintenance. By integrating Big Data into the CMMS, new mobile applications make it possible to build up valuable archives, to identify similar situations and to base yourself on a very vast history of interventions and situations to find the best solution for the problem to be solved.
Mobility Work is provided with an analytic tool to help you analyze all your maintenance data and adapt your strategy
This massification of data and the power of analysis that accompanies it thus ultimately makes it possible to set up a predictive maintenance strategy, which represents the future of industrial maintenance. Thanks to the large amount of data collected not only on the site but throughout the industrial group and even beyond, many interventions can be planned and anticipated, and others can be programmed intelligently rather than regularly and rigidly.
Digital and human maintenance
Finally, the relationship between new technological tools and their human users is an issue that should not be overlooked. We know that the more a technology is perceived as easy to use, the more it will be adopted by a team.
On this point, mobile CMMS applications represent a major advance compared to the old maintenance management solutions, because they have been designed to concretely facilitate the work of the teams and thus elicit their full support. Mobility Work, for example, has optimal ergonomics which allows each employee to take full advantage of it, in particular thanks to the tool’s customization options.
Furthermore, this solution is very agile and encourages participation. It therefore stands for cooperation, networking and information sharing. These characteristics help putting together the thoughts, qualities and skills of all the technicians involved. Digitization therefore appears to be one of the foundations of participatory management.
The mobile CMMS applications that have appeared in recent years present numerous advantages, whether they are practical, economic as well as human ones. But above all, they are part of the global movement of digitalization of industry and of the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), which undoubtedly represents the future of all kinds of productive activity. This is why they are the future of maintenance.
