Maintenance management software (CMMS) is not only intended for industrial companies. A next-gen solution such as Mobility Work is used in other sectors of activity, and in particular in logistics and transport.
To better understand how this CMMS software can improve maintenance, we met with Nathalie Nerrière, Manager of the Rouen site of ID Logistics.
Can you introduce yourself and your company?
“ID Logistics is a French contract logistics company, which was founded in 2001. Its goal is to meet the logistics needs of its customers by offering solutions adapted to each project. The Group employs 21,500 people and owns 340 sites in seventeen countries.
We receive, store and prepare products on behalf of our customers. Depending on the products handled, the Group decides whether to mechanize its sites or not. So I can say that every ID Logistics site is different. I joined the Group ten years ago and have been in charge of four sites in all. I am currently running a semi-mechanized site with a manager and three maintenance technicians.
How did you hear about Mobility Work CMMS ?
I came to know Mobility Work through social networks. I liked the concept and I presented it to the Group during an in-house innovation contest. One can ask “What is innovative about a CMMS?” The answer is very simple: the concept. I thought the concept of Mobility Work was very innovative and at the opposite of the other tools we knew.
So I contacted your teams, and they presented the application to me, which I thought was really intruiging and interesting. This is how we started working with Mobility Work.
How much time did you need to set up the CMMS?
It is rather fast. At the beginning, the Mobility Work team accompanied us and quickly presented us the architecture of the tool. Once this first step was completed, we sat down with the maintenance team and asked ourselves how we wanted to shape the tool, which I believe is an essential step.
Then everything is very simple: the application is fun, you just need to use a standard computer, there are not a thousand options. Above all, we didn’t have to wait a year for all our inventory to be filled in before starting to use the CMMS.
We started using the solution by entering our first tasks; the tool is not blocking. Later, we filled in all our spare parts and established the links. There are many tools that are unusable until the entire database is filled in, which is not the case with Mobility Work.
What system were you previously using to manage your maintenance?
I often had the opportunity to work on sites that were rather mechanized. On these sites, we used other software available on the market; but not being in pure industry, we needed a rather flexible tool and I usually felt like these solutions were heavy, difficult to implement and not very intuitive.
How did the system change and adoption of Mobility Work go?
On the site that I currently manage, there was no maintenance management software yet. This means it was a great change for the maintenance team, which was rather resistant to the idea of using a CMMS. We were working with an old-fashioned paper-based system, which suited them, but did not really allow them to access the site’s maintenance indicators.
Finally, to their great surprise, the learning curve of the tool went quite well. The simplicity of the tool and its ergonomics made them adopt it very quickly.
What do you think are the benefits of this community-based platform?
On a day-to-day basis, the community aspect does not necessarily help me. On the other hand, I see a future for it within the ID Logistics Group, as the tool will facilitate knowledge sharing and exchanges between our different sites. This would allow us to access information in real time, to consult the stocks of parts at our colleagues’ sites, or even the breakdown sheets for common machines.
For example, at the moment, we are all experiencing significant delays on spare parts. I’m currently in Rouen, but my colleague who is in the south of France potentially has the same part in his store and it’s interesting to know this thanks to the application and it makes things much easier. So I see an interest at that level and less at the inter-company level, because we are still very different from an industrial site.
Manage your spare part inventory
Have you been able to improve the management of your preventive strategy thanks to Mobility Work?
Yes, although I cannot call it an improvement since we were starting from scratch; on the other hand, Mobility Work allowed us to set up maintenance indicators. In a logistic warehouse, we call maintenance measurement the statistical overviews of the preventive and curative maintenance tasks or even of the continuous improvement, of the machine breakdown rates, etc. So it’s pretty interesting and we’re already seeing results. If you had asked me this question a few years ago, I wouldn’t necessarily have given the same answer, even if I knew my site very well.
Which feature do you use the most?
Maintenance technicians use the “task creation” function a lot, because it allows them to enter any intervention in real time, especially since the development of voice input. This feature is a big advantage, especially since it is what scared the maintenance team the most: when we mention CMMS, we imply having to enter data, which can take time when we tend to run out of time.
From now on, when a breakdown occurs on a machine, the maintenance technicians intervene with their phone and thanks to the voice input option, they can quickly describe the breakdown and make their report directly beside the equipment.
As a site manager, do you feel you have a better overview?
Yes, today I can tell if we are doing more preventive or corrective maintenance, which is essential on a site.
Everything is entered into the CMMS: the maintenance of our production lines, but also that of our building. In logistics, facility management is very important. Today, I know that 30% of my maintenance department’s time is taken up by the site’s real estate management, something I wouldn’t have bet on at the very beginning.
Tools like Mobility Work will allow us to know tomorrow which system and operating mode is the most efficient. Today, we have the purchase cost, which is a good start, but we don’t yet have the hindsight to say: “We have such a high percentage of breakdowns with such and such a system; this one costs us so much in spare parts every year, etc.” This will happen later, if we deploy Mobility Work in several sites.
What are your company’s future plans concerning the CMMS?
All our sites are different, and our customers’ needs are different, so we need a flexible and adaptable tool. With Mobility Work, the technicians can manage their maintenance as they wish, because the tool does not impose anything. The objective would be to deploy Mobility Work on other sites; we are present internationally and we do not mechanize only in France. A big advantage is also that the application is available in several languages.
Are you satisfied with the responsiveness of our team?
I have nothing to say about the responsiveness, it works well, especially the online assistance part which answers all our requests. During the setup, my technicians often came to ask me for help, even though I didn’t necessarily know the tool better than they did. So I encouraged them to use the chat to contact the support team directly to ask their questions, and indeed our requests are always taken into account quickly.
I would also like to emphasize the evolutions of the tool, initiated by customer feedback, which lead to its improvement. I’m thinking of the voice input function, for example, which probably came from a user request. In addition, new features are communicated very quickly. It’s a modern tool, and that feels good.”
Thank you very much to Nathalie Nerriere for sharing with us her experience with the Mobility Work community-based maintenance management platform!
