Skookum maintains infrastructure and equipment across twenty national sites and is committed to providing customers with higher reliability and enabling their asset management program. These objectives require quality asset information to improve maintenance outcomes, make repair versus replace decisions, and drive the cost curve lower.
Trying to capture asset data through historical, paper processes, the company’s “basic mobility,” has proven impossible. At a larger site, it accomplishes forty thousand annual work orders, each having several pieces of paper. Trying to transcribe them into a CMMS and adding quality reporting are problematic. Most attempts to move this full process to a mobile system result in failure – largely driven by the lack of adoption by field technicians. Poor adoption can be driven by a variety of reasons, such as fear of change, problematic functionality, poor bandwidth and limited on-site support – the company has experienced all of these.
Corporately, the company piloted Maximo Mobile at a large site over the course of two years – the functionality was refined and measured directly through technician feedback. This resulted in many changes to ensure an effective solution. Based on this effort, the site received the 2017 Uptime Award for Work Execution based on this paperless work management capability. This solution was then built into a central platform where it could be deployed quickly to other sites.
In October 2017, the company started a naval air station contract using the centrally configured mobile system on day one for work management – this was deployed to a new team of one hundred and twenty-five people. Although the mobile functionality and performance was solid, it took ninety days to obtain full technician buy-in. Key issues included:
- Change – Many technicians had not used a mobile CMMS solution and some “rebelled,” stating that using traditional paper was faster for them. To counter, there was an on-site chief information officer team that worked with each shop and individual technicians. Within the first month, they became more proficient and started to appreciate the downstream benefits.
- Functionality – For the first six months, the focus was on ensuring the core work management capability was effective. Then, added capabilities were provided that added more value, such as building managers receiving auto-emails when a work order status changed and full integration of maintenance data to the EAM system, including cost, dates and tech notes.
- Extending to the core reliability, availability and maintainability (RAM) platform – In years two and three, advanced capabilities were added, benefiting both the company’s customers and technician. A few of these advanced capabilities were:
- Analytics – Built smart views using a leading, cost-effective business intelligence (BI) tool to view asset and maintenance performance, such as downtime, backlog and response times.
- PM optimization – This included leveraging a leading scheduling tool and optimizing frequency and job plan profile by shop, which leveled the annual effort and provided much better PM visibility.
- Document integration – Using simple hyperlink and disciplined new building data capture allowed technicians to look for key system information, such as O&M manuals, from their mobile devices.
- eProcurement – Catalogs of twenty core vendors were digitized and integrated with the mobile system so technicians can build a purchase request (PR) with the right parts and discounts in a manner that is about three times faster than the legacy paper process.
- Executive Team – Must be fully committed organizationally and financially for a multiyear effort. Must perform due diligence to select the right software platform and pilot at a lead site before rollout.
- Pilot Site – Must have strong functional leadership from the site manager to the shop lead, as well as on-site IT support to incrementally improve the capability as needed. This proven solution must then be standardized for rollout at any site. Pilot sites will continue to pioneer new capabilities that are needed for RAM.
- Individual Sites – Must have strong functional leadership to identify issues and opportunities that improve capability for both technicians and clients. The corporate solution must be flexible enough to add about twenty percent localization, but with minimal coding.
- Technicians – It is all about the technicians. Lead techs must be incentivized through recognition or compensation to identify specific problems and opportunities that will add value to their fellow techs and clients. Candid discussions are needed.
