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r5 Ways to drive Mobile eaM roi

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barriers to MaintenanCe Mobility ....................................................................... 1

benefit #1: reduCed doWntiMe .............................................................................. 2

benefit #2: iMproved projeCt Control ................................................................. 2

benefit#3: asset integrity Control ...................................................................... 3

benefit #4: ManageMent by Walking around ...................................................... 3

benefit #5 iMproved CoMMuniCation/safety ...................................................... 4

What to look for in Mobile eaM ........................................................................... 5

ConClusion .............................................................................................................. 7

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5 Ways to drive Mobile eaM roi


By Stefan PervikGloBal induStry director

ifS aB

Mobile interfaces for enterprise asset management (EAM) software and computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) have been around for a long time.

So why are they a hot topic of interest right now? What new developments will you find in mobile EAM today that were not there a few years ago? And what problems within a maintenance and asset management organization can you solve with this technology? What types of benefits and return on investment (ROI) can an enter-prise expect? We’ll answer all of those questions in this whitepaper. We’ll also offer a few tips for selecting EAM software that is truly mobile-ready.

barriers to MaintenanCe MobilityAs stated above, mobile interfaces for EAM software have been on the market for a long time, but managed to penetrate a very small number of organizations. Some of the reasons for this are technological. Some are cultural, and some are a combination of the two.

Asset-intensive companies tend to be extremely conservative in culture. It is their nature, given that the success of the company is dependent on prudent, cost effective operation of capital assets over a period of decades. Spending money on handheld devices for technicians might not look like an attractive option when paper schedules and record keeping are already sufficient.

One cultural element among software vendors that has changed is a certain “all or nothing” approach to the mobile interface that frankly has proven counter-productive. The first mobile EAM interface IFS developed was on a Palm Pilot. The technology in the Palm OS for presenting data on the small screen was not perfect to be sure, but IFS and a number of our competitors still tried to offer all of the functionality normally available to a technician or manager running the full EAM suite on a laptop or desktop machine—all in that smaller format. Many IFS customers opted to instead use our open, service-oriented architecture to develop their own, more limited, interfaces in .NET, interacting with IFS Applications through our easy-to-expose web services and application program interfaces (APIs).

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All of these barriers are either falling or gradually being reduced. The cost of the handheld devices has come down precipitously. Handhelds are available in various shapes and sizes, ranging from ruggedized devices to a simple consumer smartphone running the Android or iOS interfaces. IFS, along with much of the rest of the market, has re-architected its mobile interfaces to take advantage of new devices, operating systems and the lessons we learned from our earlier interfaces.

And given the mission-critical nature of many capital assets in sectors like oil and gas, power generation, aerospace and defense and others, the idea of greater efficiency and improved real-time visibility into the state of assets and the activities of technicians is appealing. This means that asset-intensive organizations can realize important and measurable benefits by crossing any remaining technology or cultural barriers to a mobile EAM solution.

benefit #1: reduCed doWntiMe The role of an executive in charge of significant productive assets like process manu-facturing facilities, offshore oil rigs, nuclear power plants or jet aircraft is to maxi-mize the value realized from the capital asset while controlling cost. Any asset will experience at least some incremental downtime or loss of capacity during predictive or preventive maintenance work, refits or lifecycle extensions. In these situations, or in a break-fix scenario, the more rapidly work can be completed, the more rapidly the piece of equipment or asset can return to productive use. And one of the main places to take up slack in these activities is to speed up communication. As the maintenance route changes, the technician being notified through a mobile work order application does not need to go back to a central office or scheduling board to see that the order of his work has been adjusted. That saves time. Once at a machine to be serviced, if the technician can identify which parts ought to be replaced, check their availability in inventory and have them sent to him right there at the machine by using a mobile EAM interface, that shaves time off of the repair process, which in turn gets it back into productive use more rapidly.

This efficiency improvement potential is even greater when managing more extensive and multi-faceted asset management projects with multiple dependencies and concurrent activities. Which brings us to our next point.

benefit #2: iMproved projeCt ControlFor most asset-intensive companies, projects are the cornerstone of the business. Managing projects of various sizes and complexity is often the key to success. However, companies still struggle with fragmented business solutions that lack inte-gration, making a plant shutdown, a refit of a production line or maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) of a jet or marine engine difficult to manage. Even with power-

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ful back end project management functionality, it can be difficult to manage a project in real time because the maintenance technician is recording work performed well after the fact—at the end of the day when they are back at a computer. This means that work is often not recorded or is recorded inaccurately. Front office personnel cannot determine what is going on with a project in real time, which in turns slows down the ability to execute against a project plan.

In an EAM solution designed for this environment, the project itself is the engine that drives activities, ensuring high-level visibility and transparency throughout the enterprise value chain. Mobility adds value to projects by:

• Allowingworktoberecordedinrealtimeasitisperformed,soprojectmanagershave immediate visibility into what is being accomplished.

• Makingrevisionsimmediatelyavailabletoindividualsworkingonprojectstoavoid work on the wrong revision.

• Increasingengagementwiththeenterprisesystem.Themoreandbetterinforma-tion winds up attached to the project record, the better a project manager will be able to marshal the appropriate resources.

benefit#3: asset integrity ControlAssets are often mission-critical not just for their productive capacity, but because failures can result in environmental damage, loss of life and litigation. In these situa-tions, you need more than maintenance -- you need the advanced discipline of Asset Integrity Management (AIM). This not only means that regular scheduled mainte-nance must be performed, but the readiness and serviceability of the asset must be documented on a very granular level. Mobility adds value to an AIM program by:

• EnhancingusabilitysoworkperformediscapturedintheEAMsystemmoreaccurately and completely.

• Deliveringautomatedroutinginformationtomaintenancetechnicianstoincreasepercentage of scheduled work performed and notifying them of emergent problems that need to be addressed immediately.

• Puttingdiagnostic,maintenanceinventoryandotherdatainthehandsoftechni-cians at the site of maintenance.

benefit #4: ManageMent by Walking aroundWhen many of us think about mobile EAM, we think of apps developed for hand-held ruggedized or consumer devices. These apps are aimed at the narrow function of work order management, and are used to connect repair and maintenance activities

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at the machine with the EAM systems in a bidirectional fashion across functions like maintenance inventory, project management, maintenance and more.

We are not putting the entire EAM suite in the mobile app, but rather in the interest of usability are offering a specialized, streamlined interface for specific repetitive purposes. Most people who will use a mobile work order app on a hand-held device will be front line and plant floor technical staff. They’re typically averse to paperwork and administration, so a simple mobile interface that gives them confi-dence in its functionality and usability will lead to improvements in the quality of their reporting and data.

But mobile is also important for administration and management. These power users of the EAM suite require a more robust EAM experience including mainte-nance inventory functionality, human resources and even finance. They may use a full EAM suite on a tablet running Windows 8, if this is in fact available from their EAM software vendor. The touchscreen format may be conducive for use during standing meetings and “management by walking around.” Again, this tablet usage should not be dependent on using a stripped down mobile app for Windows 8 as is the case for app used by technicians—rather, the full enterprise suite ought to be usable on a touchscreen device on the operating system.

benefit #5 iMproved CoMMuniCation/safetyMobile devices are essentially communication tools that can solve problems in several more nontangible areas of the business.

One problem confronted by many asset-intensive companies is the aging of the workforce. In the United States, for instance, the single largest generation of people was born between 1946 and 1964, and many of them will retire in the next 10 years. These “baby boomers” comprise about a third of the U.S. workforce, and subsequent generations are too small to offer replacement workers, particularly in industrial maintenance, plant management and industry engineering. In many asset-intensive environments, these more senior workers are more than valuable team members—they are walking, talking repositories of asset information. They possess the tribal knowledge of ad hoc processes, diagnostic information and more. That plant manager may know that when a pump in your facility has built up too much head pressure, it makes a certain sound. Or perhaps they have an informal algorithm in their head to determine staffing levels for a plant shutdown. When that person collects their gold watch and retires, all of that knowledge walks out of the organization … unless they are prompted to add it to equipment records and other repositories in EAM via a mobile device. Mobility increases EAM and other enterprise software engagement, increasing data entering the system through routine reporting as well as ad hoc reporting.

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Mobility will help address the aging workforce issue in other ways as well. Backfilling behind these retiring employees will be a challenge as there is a dearth of industrial engineering and other manufacturing- and maintenance-related graduates coming out of colleges and universities. Competition for this new generation of workers will be fierce, and a workplace with intuitive and modern technology will be more attractive than one hobbling along on various legacy systems. The Google and mobile computing revolutions have affected us all, and we are all developing expectations for the computer technology we use. This next generation will be much more demanding when it comes to technology, and will expect the software they use every day to conform to their needs rather than the other way around.

Mobility can address life safety issues in several ways, the most obvious being the real-time visibility of equipment condition and serviceability and the resulting improvements in asset integrity management. But mobile devices also are GPS enabled, which can offer life safety benefits in settings like mining and oil and gas.

ifS Mobile Work orders is a native app for android and Windows Mobile, designed as an extension of existing ifS applications and eaM functionality.

What to look for in Mobile eaMIt ought to be pretty obvious that the mobile interface and the EAM solution need to be developed to work together. When selecting mobile EAM, look for an enter-prise vendor that has developed and offers its own mobile interface. Using a third party mobile interface will burden you with multiple contacts, contractual agreements

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and technologies. If you experience a problem, it may be a challenge to figure out who is responsible for resolving it because there may be finger pointing between vendors, system integrators and even your own internal implementation team.

But the underlying EAM solution also needs to be developed as a full suite rather than as a bolt-on maintenance solution for an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application. Only when functions like finance, supply chain management, project management and human resources are integrated with the maintenance management functionality can you really benefit from the real-time enterprise visibility mobile EAM has the potential to deliver. And you would be surprised how many well-known and large enterprise software vendors in essence are offering EAM solutions that they have purchased from other companies or developed separately from their ERP solutions. These ERP and EAM products are then integrated in a point-to-point fashion, which is obviously very limiting and obscures bilateral visibility of data points that are not subject to integration. Some things to consider:

• Bilateralvisibilitybetweeninventoryandsupplychainmanagementandmainte-nance is critical. The technician on the plant floor or at a work site ought to be able to see what inventory is available to determine if an asset can be returned to service immediately or must be taken offline. And parts managers and supply chain managers need real-time visibility of parts demand so they can run the part to the technician or try to expedite acquisition or transfer from another location or facility.

• Mobileworkordersandhumanresourcesfunctionalitymustbeintegrated. This allows intelligent scheduling given available workers, with full visibility of slated vacations, sicknesses and technical skills and certifications. As a work order is assigned through the mobile work order system, does it require a confined space certification, and if it does, is it going to a technician with the necessary credential?

• Differentmobileoptionsmustbeavailablefordifferentusecases,rangingfromthe technician on the plant floor walking a maintenance route to the plant manager marshaling resources and assigning tasks to the CFO or operations manager, darting from one meeting to the other, in need of real time asset data.

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ConClusionAn investment in mobile EAM will drive both tangible and nontangible returns in any asset-intensive organization. And selecting the right EAM software and mobile options will reduce cost, complexity and allow a quicker time to value, increasing total ROI. Mobile technology has improved, and the demands placed on the enter-prise for real-time asset data both suggest that now is the time to invest in this technology.

Stefan Pervik is Global industry director responsible for asset management. He has more than 20 years of experience in enterprise software, gathered in an array of research and develop-ment, sales and directorship roles. He holds a BSa degree in Systems analysis and Software from the university of Gothenburg.

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about ifs ifS is a public company (oMX Sto: ifS) founded in 1983 that develops, supplies, and implements ifS applications™, a component-based extended erP suite built on Soa technology. ifS focuses on agile businesses where any of four core processes are strategic: service & asset management, manufacturing, supply chain and projects. the company has more than 2,000 customers and is present in 50+ countries with 2,800 employees in total.

More details can be found at www.ifsWorld.com. for further information, e-mail to [email protected]

www.ifsWorld.comtHiS docuMent May contain StateMentS of PoSSiBle future functionalit y for ifS’ SoftWare ProductS and tecHnoloGy. SucH StateMent S of future functionalit y are for inforMation PurP oSeS only and SHould not Be interPre ted a S an y c oMMitMent or rePreSentat ion. ifS and all ifS Product naMeS are tr adeMarkS of ifS . tHe naMeS of actual c oMPanieS and Product S Mentioned Herein May Be tHe tr adeMarkS of tHeir reSPect ive oWnerS.

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