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One of the big challenges of selling maintenance software is convincing people that it can be adopted quickly. This is why every CMMS provider flaunts how their solution is “easy to use”.
If you dig a little deeper, the real problem lies in the change of mindset. Many organizations have a long-standing relationship with reactive maintenance and many older technicians didn’t grow up with smartphones in their hands. Building a mobile maintenance workforce based on a mobile CMMS, while bringing huge benefits, also inevitably brings significant changes to the workflow which are bound to stir up some resistance.
Moving from reactive maintenance to mobile maintenance
To be clear, having a mobile maintenance team is beneficial no matter which maintenance strategy you rely on the most, even if you are purely reactive.
The most common way I’ve seen organizations set up mobile maintenance workforce is during the transition from reactive to preventive maintenance. The reason for that is because the implementation of CMMS software often coincides with the switch to proactive maintenance. Since most of the popular CMMS solutions on the market can now be used on mobile devices, it would be a missed opportunity if organizations wouldn’t incorporate that into their newly established workflows.
As with any major change, the switch is something that needs to happen gradually. Some maintenance departments decide to do a pilot run where they put a few assets on a preventive maintenance plan and basically use that to train the team on how to make the most out of mobile maintenance software and to get them used to a new workflow. When the time is right, the plan and practices are expanded on the rest of the assets.
The benefits of mobile maintenance
Having a mobile-enabled maintenance team is a requirement for building highly efficient maintenance workflows.
A while back, when we were trying to gather some testimonials for our website, these were the most commonly cited benefits of having a mobile maintenance team:
- increasing productivity by up to 30% through an increased level of automation, better organization, minimizing administrative tasks, and having instant access to asset history
- having the ability to send instant notification to all (or only specific) members of the maintenance team and enabling technicians to quickly exchange notes and tips
- improved accountability as each technician has its own account and the mobile CMMS automatically logs in work as Work Orders and PMs are completed
- tracking and approving work done by outside contractors
All of these benefits are enhanced if you are overseeing multiple locations, have a highly distributed maintenance team, or perform a lot of work in the field.
Bryan Christiansen is the founder and CEO at Limble CMMS. Limble is a modern, easy to use mobile CMMS software that takes the stress and chaos out of maintenance by helping managers organize, automate, and streamline their maintenance operations.