Dominique Domas is an International Reliability Manager in Saint Gobain Sekurit International. His scope of activity covers all 32 Sekurit plants specialized in manufacturing automotive glass (windscreens, side windows, rear windows) in 19 countries.
Among other things, his activity consists in standardizing maintenance methods across the group’s plants, and in generalizing the exchange of good practices from one plant to another. Although the production tool is common, these plants currently operate independently with regard to maintenance. Mr. Domas agreed to tell us about the first stages of the deployment of maintenance management platform Mobility Work within the group and to talk about his objectives in order to standardize good maintenance practices.
“Mobility Work stands out from other CMMS tools, which are very constraining in terms of customization”
“What convinced you to test the CMMS?
Dominique Domas: I discovered Mobility Work through NOVA External Ventures, an internal team in charge of building partnerships with startups and incubators around the world, according to Saint Gobain’s main strategic plans. Among other things, we are indeed increasingly interested in industry 4.0, smart devices, smart glasses, etc.
I was actually fully convinced by the presentation made by Mr. Marc-Antoine Talva (Mobility Work’s CEO); this presentation allowed us to go through all the most critical maintenance issues: preventive and corrective operations, spare part management, data organization… This presentation convinced me to go ahead and to concretely give the tool a try.
Is the solution properly implemented in your company?
For now, Mobility Work CMMS still is a project under evaluation within Sekurit. The first phase of the project was to deploy Mobility Work in one of our French plant, in Aniche, and to test the community aspect, which is one of Mobility Work’s main advantages. We wanted to connect several plants over a short period of time, two other French plants in this case. Saint Gobain Sekurit being an international group, our goal is to extend the project to other factories throughout the world, including Asia, Europe, and South America.
In the Mobility Work app, create tasks, activities, and equipment easily: assign users, add labels…
The deployment of the Aniche plant started in June 2017, although not without difficulty. Possible reasons for this include the fact that our previous CMMS was very structured, but also very little used, and that our specifications were not clearly defined from the beginning. This deployment took longer than expected since we needed to find our way around from a structural point of view – the tool is actually not to blame. Mobility Work CMMS is very open and does not force us to work with heavy structuring, which is why need to have clear ideas regarding our own organization.
We have just deployed our two other French plants in early 2018, and we are currently expanding the solution. We have just added our Chinese plant in March, and our plants in the Czech Republic and Sweden should also be deployed soon. We hope to have the project validated in all these plants by the end of May (active project and positive user feedback) so that we will be able to develop Mobility Work as a standard within Sekurit.
What are the app’s main benefits according to you?
Following our deployment experience in Aniche, we developed a new structure, that is to say a deployment standard. It was very interesting for us not to be subject to any constraint from Mobility Work. These standards now allow us to deploy faster. This structuring takes the form of an Excel file corresponding to a very customized version of the data import document provided by Mobility Work at the beginning of the project, which we considerably enriched to obtain a deployment standard in Sekurit. It also helps us improve our deployment time.
This is one of Mobility Work’s main advantages: on one hand, this initial freedom implies that the company wishing to carry out a test has to structure itself; on the other hand, the tool sets no limit to this structuring. Mobility Work stands out from other CMMS tools, which are very structuring and constraining in terms of data registration, and limit the possibilities in terms of customization according to the own needs of the company.
As far as maintenance technicians are concerned, there are two groups of people: some of them are not used to using smartphones and tablets and were more used to very stable tools, which was more comfortable for them, and thus have more difficulty getting used to this very open system; now that they have become used to it, things are going better. This category still tends to go back to the office to provide daily or midday reports.
On the other hand, some populations are more familiar with digital tools, and thus do not have any issue when registering tasks or reporting them orally using the voice recognition tool. Mobility Work implies to change behaviors, which we did not necessarily expect at first. It sure was a surprise for us, but a good one: it allows us to obtain a more relevant, lively and dynamic analytical tool, which we did not have before. We are now able to work in real time. Mobility Work also implies to change our tools, because technicians were used to working on a desktop. The tooling system is now completely different: smartphones, tablets, etc., which are not common traditional maintenance tools.
Which feature do you use the most, that you cannot do without?
The most relevant feature, in my opinion, is the possibility of creating a task using a mobile app, and recording it using voice recognition in order to generate a report, which is extremely convenient. We didn’t have this kind of feature before, which obviously implies changing behavior, but which is also very interesting and entertaining for technicians.
Thanks to Mobility CMMS, manage your maintenance activities easily and exchange information with your colleagues
As for me, I mainly use the analytics feature, which is supposed to evolve very soon to become a real-time tool. Saint Gobain Sekurit, and in particular the automotive branch, is engaged in a continuous improvement process (WCM). The structuring I was talking about earlier makes it possible to obtain a much more powerful analytics tool since it provides a unique and common structuring for all the factories, which was not the case before. We are still in the project phase, but I hope to quickly benefit from a transversal analysis tool, in order to be able to monitor several plants at the same time. For the moment, I can only monitor them one by one case, and I am looking forward to benefiting from this possible evolution. Mobility Work is a very useful tool which allows us to study in a very macroscopic way the state of health of the maintenance of our plants in real time, or even delayed by one hour.
Which feature would you like to see developed first?
First, as I said, I am waiting for an evolution of the analytics tool, but I also hope to see more profound evolutions: this is the advantage and disadvantage of having no limit in terms of structuring. Nowadays, for example, losses are very critical for factories. In Mobility Work CMMS, losses are identified as the time spent by the maintenance team on the machine. However, we cannot know how much of this time is impacting production, which actually represents the real loss within a plant. Losses are not only the time spent on the machine by the technicians but also the time during which the machine has not been able to produce; as a matter of fact, machines may have broken down and continue to produce. That is the feature I would like to see improved in Mobility Work.
Did you encounter proper service support?
I have two answers to this, linked to two different themes: whenever an issue occurs (linked to the app for instance), the support team is very reactive, and that is everything you can expect from a startup.
As far as evolution requests and new features are concerned, I would not necessarily take into account reactivity, but rather organization and prioritization as to the management of deployments and evolution planning. And I think that’s one of the main weaknesses with startups: I sometimes find it difficult to know your priorities or getting feedback on the hierarchy of problems.
In conclusion…
The automotive sector is very demanding, and so am I. I believe in this project, and I hope that with the integration of many new customers, mostly large groups, customer satisfaction will remain unchanged and that the team will be large enough to absorb growth.”
Thanks to Mr. Domas for delivering his honest testimony: user feedbacks are at the heart of our approach, and are helping us improve our product on a daily basis.
