In aeronautics, adopting a CMMS is more useful than ever to optimize maintenance management and increase productivity. Jérôme*, maintenance manager at Safran, told us about his experience in setting up a next-gen CMMS.
Safran is one of the flagships of French industry, and the descendant of Snecma and Sagem. This large group has an international presence in the fields of aeronautics, space and defense. At the Loches site in the Indre-et-Loire region of France, the Safran Electrical Components division produces nearly 2 million electrical harnesses for landing gear each year. This unique industrial site is renowned for its expertise in the manufacture of cables and protective elements capable of withstanding severe environments, such as in-flight refueling hoses.
We met Jérôme*, an experienced maintenance manager, who has been in charge of all the machinery and production part of the site for over a year. He explains why and how his industrial site adopted Mobility Work’s CMMS to optimize its maintenance management.
Did you already have a CMMS for maintenance management before implementing Mobility Work?
No, the old maintenance management system at Safran was not really a CMMS: it only made it possible to make intervention requests through IT tickets, but it was software that was designed for IT or IT departments, not for industrial maintenance. We couldn’t manage stocks, for example, and we only had a small historical part.
Inventory management was done separately, on Excel files or other types of media. There was no preventive maintenance, no dashboards… It was very laborious: for example, if we wanted to extract or recover data, we had to do cross tables, it was complicated.
Did you participate in the transition from the old maintenance management system to the new CMMS? How long did it take to deploy Mobility Work?
Yes, I arrived just before the change. We made the transition a month after my arrival.
It took us around 15 days to set up the new CMMS software at production level, to give access and authorizations to the intervention requesters, etc., and to be operational in its use. During these 15 days, we worked in parallel with the two systems, the old and the new.
How did the adoption of Mobility Work CMMS go by regular users in the Safran factory?
At Safran, our maintenance team includes four technicians. We were all very interested in the tool, so we quickly adopted it because we knew how much it could bring us compared to what we had before.
On the production side, i.e., for the intervention requesters, it also went well, because the handling is very easy compared to what we used before. In 3 or 4 clicks, they can create an intervention request, whereas it was much more complicated before. They quickly adopted Mobility Work too, and the implementation was not a problem. The production teams understood the interest of changing the maintenance management system and they all went in the same direction.
Quickly create an intervention request with the mobile CMMS
How did you import your old data into your new CMMS?
Someone took care of doing Excel extractions from our old system, which allowed us to pre-fill the tables that Mobility Work had provided us with. These were transfer tables to import our data into the CMMS and be able to recover part of the history we had.
We also had files in Excel format on spare parts stocks, we were able to import them quickly into the new CMMS. It just required a little bit of formatting work beforehand. Once we submitted our data, the Mobility Work team integrated it into the software very quickly, within a day.
Was the possibility of quickly importing your data an important point for you?
Yes, it was something that mattered. This allowed us to recover a history, to have data, to reintegrate our spare parts management file. All of this was crucial for us, so as not to lose the data that had been accumulated previously.
Even if today we realize that we had really little data with our old system compared to all the data we have today, for example with tags, cost centers, etc. thanks to Mobility Work.
What other arguments convinced you to adopt Mobility Work?
The maintenance community part interested us, in particular for the possibility to share data and information, to solve problems and breakdowns, to find other companies or service providers to exchange with regarding the problems we may encounter on our machines.
All of this weighed in the balance when choosing a CMMS solution. Today, we regularly look to the community to find new suppliers, for example.
Find suppliers in the official Mobility Work catalog
What has the implementation of Mobility Work changed for you?
It is necessary to know that we started from far, because before Mobility Work we used a system which was not at all adapted to the maintenance. We had no dashboard for example, and very little functionality. It was very complicated to analyze the data.
Mobility Work brought us a lot at this level. In a few clicks we have access to all the dashboards. The “Tops 10” charts make it possible to orientate oneself very quickly on what poses a problem, to be able to target the real dysfunctions and to direct our efforts according to the indicators provided by the CMMS software.
Mobility Work is provided with an analytic tool to help you analyze all your maintenance data and adapt your strategy
We regularly consult these indicators, in particular the evolution of the number of tasks, to see very quickly when we start to drift and that we need to speed up on certain points in order to be able to maintain a certain level of performance. All of this was very difficult before Mobility Work.
On which points would you say that the Mobility Work CMMS has made you progress the most?
We have gained a lot in traceability, efficiency and responsiveness. Recently, we have started to use the Mobility Work application even more for questions related to safety: the regulatory controls, the management of these controls thanks to the reports recorded in the CMMS, to have a maximum of traceability without having to keep maintenance follow-up books, which is very tedious. The CMMS allowed us to replace these books and to have a more precise follow-up on the regulatory and periodic verification part. In particular, it allows us to have a schedule for regulatory controls.
In terms of responsiveness, everything is much easier with the Mobility Work application than with Excel, which we used before. Notifications and reminders allow us to be more responsive.
It also makes it easier for us to track information. For example, a person who creates a service request can have more information than before, follow the work of maintenance teams in real time and know when the equipment is being repaired. This is a big plus of the app.
Are there any features of the CMMS that have particularly improved your daily life?
Dashboards, for example, are used a lot to provide feedback to production departments, or to present reports to our hierarchy. This feature saves us a lot of time. This makes it easy for us to know where we are, what is the problem, etc.
We also use the Mobility Work CMMS for everything related to the management of the planning of interventions, team schedules, data, to do preventive maintenance, especially in relation to regulatory controls.
For the past year, we have also tried to use the application for the management of spare parts. We had to revise our way of naming our spare parts to be able to have a better follow-up every time we release a part or to link the spare parts to the equipment.
We have been working over a year on the data to make even more use of the CMMS for the management of spare parts, an area in which we want to improve.
At Safran, we also really like the filters. They are useful to us for example to prepare certain meetings or to make quick extractions. The production teams also greatly appreciate this function, so that they can sort and select only what interests them, and not get lost in all the data on the site.
What relationship do you have with the Mobility Work team? How do you interact with us?
I sometimes exchange by email with the account manager who follows us, and a lot with the CMMS customer support accessible from the application. The chat system with your support team is very practical, it allows us to send a message directly as soon as you have a concern, to react immediately rather than letting things drag on. And the customer support is very responsive to take care of our requests.
Do you have upcoming projects with Mobility Work?
Yes, we would love to develop all the 4.0 technologies, for example by equipping ourselves with smartphones and tablets. Today, some maintenance technicians already use the mobile application that they installed themselves on their personal smartphones, and this is something that we would like to develop further, for example to be even more reactive when validating interventions, or to be able to add documents to the CMMS, such as photos for example, or enter more data. This is what we want to develop on our site.
Our management would also like to use Mobility Work software for the management of production tools. Today, we don’t really take care of that in the maintenance department. This is something that we would like to integrate into the CMMS, perhaps by setting up additional accesses, for quality managers or production team leaders, for example. This would allow us to manage production tools, internal or external control tools, with the application.
Some concluding words
Overall we are very satisfied with Mobility Work at Safran, it is a very powerful tool. We had come a long way given the system we had before, and we have only seen positive things since we adopted the Mobility Work CMMS software.
*The first name has been changed
