Today, most industrial companies are using an ERP (Enterprise Resources Planning) software and a CMMS. An ERP is a main tool in a company’s information system, defined by a group of modules (production, purchasing, scheduling, etc.) linked to a single database. The ERP is the cornerstone of the company’s information and decision-making system; yet with the emergence of industry 4.0, enterprise resources planning software tend to show their limits, particularly in terms of usability. These software are also particularly expensive to purchase and to deploy, as well as heavy and complex to implement, while locking the user in a dependency relationship with the enterprise resources planning software publisher.
ERP & CMMS Software Interface: Testimony
At the same time, more and more simple, affordable and user-friendly business applications in SaaS mode are emerging. These will allow you to easily connect your enterprise resources planning software to other more flexible, customer-oriented tools, taking into account the latest evolutions of industry 4.0 (Big Data, IoT, etc.).
Mobility Work’s calendar feature allows you to schedule all your preventive and predictive maintenance tasks.
The ultimate goal is to enable you to centralize, use and analyze all the information available in your enterprise resources planning software after having been duplicated in a dynamic tool adapted to modern business issues.
Why connecting your ERP to your CMMS?
An ERP is an indispensable tool for many companies, since it enables them to connect operational functions and services by gathering common data, to establish standards and to make transactional data concrete and usable (generating of an accounting entry in the sales journal following a sale for example). The field of application of ERPs is thus very wide: purchasing, sales, commercial management, accounting, inventory management and many others.
The ERP guarantees information uniqueness. However, this information is not always usable by field operators because enterprise resources planning software are generally very difficult to use. This is indeed a recurring problem with these software, which are generally quite far from the applications that we all use in our daily lives, both in terms of interfaces and user experience (number of clicks, number of fields to fill in, etc.).
Unfortunately, it is impossible for many companies to do without enterprise resources planning software. Indeed, many of them actually prefer to manage maintenance stocks and orders financial information directly in the enterprise resources planning software rather than in the Computerized Maintenance Management System. The reason is that companies would rather not delegate finance; also, after all the difficulties encountered by companies during the integration of their enterprise resources planning software, it seems very unlikely that they agree to modify their purchasing processes.
Yet, some industry 4.0 next-gen maintenance management applications such as Mobility Work are meant to be at the heart of the company’s information system, and therefore offer the possibility to be connected to your enterprise resources planning software.
Placing the CMMS at the heart of the company
Pierrick Pincemin, industrialization manager at FMGC, the foundry subsidiary of material transformation specialist Farinia Group, decided to connect his next-gen CMMS Mobility Work to the company’s enterprise resources planning software. He says: “We are using our maintenance management software in several ways: the maintenance department uses it internally to follow-up repairs, to schedule maintenance plans, technical shutdowns, weekend shift, night shift; the methods department uses it to follow up all tooling-related maintenance activities… Other departments of the company also use it: the purchasing department in order to track maintenance expenses, and the accounting department to collect financial information and calculate the cost price of our manufactured products. Mobility Work is used by around 100 people on the site out of 400, including the production department”.
The purpose of this connection is to centralize all the data in a single tool, in this case the maintenance management software. It is thus possible to link order costs with spare parts and intervention costs in order to determine the total cost of maintenance work on equipment, which is necessary to answer this question: should we maintain or invest? According to Pierrick Pincemin, Mobility Work is “very accessible and allows all curative, regulatory and preventive maintenance interventions to be followed up very quickly. Moreover, as it is possible to associate hours to the tasks associated with the equipment, it is easy to detect the areas of failure of the foundry in order to be able to maintain or invest even better in the future”.
All news related to ongoing interventions are available from Mobility Work mobile application’s newsfeed, available on iOS and Android.
To make such a decision, it is therefore necessary to cross as much information as possible from different systems. The goal of Mobility Work CMMS is to help you optimize easily your financial flow management, and to draw performance indicators (KPIs) as well as to find ways to improve your general management.
What are the concrete applications of this connection?
Purchase requests, as well as order and stock management, are carried out in enterprise resources planning software. Orders are linked to Mobility Work via the intervention number, so that users can analyze the necessary information from their enterprise resources planning software in Mobility Work’s analytical tool.
The parts are associated between Mobility Work and the ERP via the article code number. Every hour, the enterprise resources planning software system updates certain information, including the quantity and location of the spare parts directly in Mobility Work. This step allows technicians to easily access all spare parts information from their mobile app without going through the ERP, installed on a desktop computer and offering a complicated interface.
Finally, spare parts are taken of the stock in the enterprise resources planning software, and associated with Mobility Work via a task number. All these parts produced are copied into the CMMS in the interventions, and enriching equipment nomenclatures.
Pierrick Pincemin also says: “We can cross Mobility Work data with our ERP’s. We are able to track hours in the application, as well as SAP hours and machine’s spare parts tracked under SAP. From there, we can finalize costs, either for production, or on equipment or sub-equipment, which leads us to ask ourselves the following question: should we maintain our equipment or invest? In the end, this allows us to justify production investments”.
The data copied following this connection can then be collected by Mobility Work analytical tool, in the form of tables, graphs and dynamic indicators. With Mobility Work maintenance management app’s APIs, connect any system (production for example) to your maintenance management software to send or receive all kinds of data (MTBF, availability rates, scrapping rates, etc.). Possibilities are endless!
Interconnected systems and services are a key issue in 4.0 industry, which promise companies that have understood their full measure a gain in productivity and growth. Mobility, exchange and open systems already play a key role in our daily lives, and have in fact directly influenced business management. At Mobility Work, we believe in the power of community and in information sharing, that is why we have created the first next-gen community-based maintenance management platform, including a maintenance management software, the first social maintenance network and a marketplace open to manufacturers and service providers.
For more information about the connection between your ERP and our CMMS Mobility Work, please feel free to contact us.
