There’s a high cost to be paid for poor enterprise asset management (EAM). Downtime is the single largest source of lost productivity and revenue for capital-intensive sectors such as heavy manufacturing, oil and gas, and utilities. According to analyst company Aberdeen Research, unplanned downtime can cost manufacturers as much as $260,000 an hour.
Controlling plant and asset maintenance expenses while also improving the return on assets is key in these industries. To meet these objectives, many companies adopt mobile technology as an integral part of their EAM strategy.
So just how do these mobile EAM solutions work in the field?
Mobile EAM and field service
Mobile EAM starts with transitioning from paper-based work orders (planned, break/fix or service requests) to equipment maintenance software linked between a mobilized workforce and your organization. The idea is to give field workers — employees who spend part or all of their time away from a central office — access to data from your organization’s back-end system or cloud service. A mobile EAM should also include the ability to input facility, structures, and other asset inspection and asset maintenance reports in these same systems.
Using a mobile device, field technicians can capture traditional work order data and site evidence, as well as initiate downstream workflows through quoting, parts requisition, and equipment surveying. Equipment maintenance software can receive information and instructions for completing work orders onsite and document the tasks finished, issues identified, time spent, parts used, and equipment collected for repair. In addition, the ability to add pictures with notes, audio and video uploads, time stamps, and signatures into automated reports create reliable and transparent records.
Drive operational excellence
EAM technology delivers value to your field service teams and across the wider organization in a multitude of ways. It can help:
- Advance from descriptive reporting and historical analyses to real-time measurable processes,
- Ensure critical assets are properly and regularly inspected and maintained,
- Allow you to integrate data into the rest of the business, including warehouse management systems,
- Use data from the frontlines to track and closely monitor operations, identify trends, and guide decisions,
- Shift from reactive to proactive maintenance practices,
- Optimize resource efficiency and asset reliability that in turn enhances the user/customer experience, and
- Move from the traditional break-fix model (“we sell you equipment”) to an outcome-based model (“we sell you results”) that create profitable new revenue streams.
Enterprises that continue to use manual processes when equipment management software exist, miss out on opportunities to automate and synchronize asset inspection and asset maintenance processes. That leaves agile industry competitors in a position to unseat well-established companies that have yet to build mobile EAM transformation into their business models.
Whether inspecting oil rigs, installing smart meters, or maintaining heavy equipment, low-code app companies like ProntoForms replace clunky manual paper processes with mobile, enterprise-grade asset management tools.
Want to see TrueContext‘s enterprise asset management in action? Look no further than Cooke Aquaculture, North America’s largest producer of Atlantic salmon. With TrueContext they automated asset tracking and streamline asset maintenance from multi-day to real-time. Watch their customer success video to learn how they saved $2.1 million per year.
