The whole world of maintenance in your hand – Mobile maintenance: advantages, opportunities and challenges

Mobile maintenance, which involves carrying out maintenance and repair work using mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets, has many advantages. It enables technicians and service staff to access important information on site, record and analyse material consumption and measurement data and document damage, root cause analyses and tours. Interlinking with warehouse logistics for spare parts offers additional points of contact for meaningful mobile processing, for example for steps such as reserving and issuing materials as well as incoming and outgoing materials. This enables companies to organise their maintenance processes more efficiently, shorten response times and increase productivity.

Mobile maintenance is a general technology and working method that offers advantages for all sectors and areas. It is primarily about optimally mapping the individual maintenance processes of each company for the respective use cases. This means that a mobile solution can be used profitably wherever maintenance is carried out.

Higher data quality and ...

However, there are industries and business areas in which some of the advantages of a mobile solution – such as the ability to collect data on site and the high degree of data up-to-dateness in real time – are particularly important. For example, the larger the area on which maintenance is carried out, the greater the advantage of not having to call up data on a desktop, but on the go on a smartphone – a good example of this is wind farms or the chemical giant BASF. For example, BASF SE operates chemical pumps of various types in mid-five-figure quantities over an area of ten square kilometres at the Verbund site in Ludwigshafen. These pumps are scattered across the entire plant area of the Verbund site in around 200 production facilities: a huge challenge for the maintenance team. By skilfully filtering pending tasks, travel times can be saved, for example, by pre-planning locally related tasks in one step and completing them in the same time frame. Another example of the optimisation of travel times is stocktaking, where double counting can be enforced directly on site by the system by checking against the stock, thus eliminating the need to travel to the site later for a follow-up check. The main advantages of mobile maintenance are obvious: all the information that the maintenance technician needs to process maintenance orders and make decisions is up-to-date and can be called up at any time and from anywhere. It is therefore possible to minimise queries to superiors and other technical experts as far as possible. In addition, maintenance work such as work orders or checklists can be processed and documented on site in a route-optimised manner. Fault messages can also be recorded directly and in real time on the system. This data can also be analysed in real time and made available to all other maintenance staff.

... Data availability in real time

Capturing information with a mobile solution is easy and increases the willingness of technicians to work with such systems. An excellent and desirable consequence is that data capture using a mobile solution ensures higher data quality. In addition, transmission errors (from paper to PC) will be avoided.

The availability of all relevant information also makes it easier to train new technicians in times of the increasing shortage of skilled workers. Working on the system with additional information on the smartphone is also much less complicated for less trained technicians. Less qualified employees can carry out higher-value tasks, as checklists, work plans, limit values, drawings and similar information can be called up on the smartphone or tablet to suit the respective system.

User-defined processes

The costs of introducing a complex mobile solution should also not be underestimated. Targeted advice and the choice of the right mobile technology are therefore crucial for the success of the project. There are many solutions and solution providers – some with very different approaches. Based on 40 years of experience in maintenance and technical expertise, SPIE RODIAS has developed its own mobile solution, Insight Mobile, which has now been successfully on the market for almost ten years. Insight Mobile combines classic mobile use cases such as fault reports, work orders, warehouse management and checklists with new innovative solutions such as augmented reality, AI-based spare parts search and voice-controlled checklists. The major EAM providers such as IBM, SAP and Hexagon attach great importance to complex and highly customisable systems. But according to Spie, these providers often only provide standardised mobile solutions in which exactly these aspects are neglected, with the result that EAM solutions become more like planning tools for maintenance. According to SPIE RODIAS, Insight Mobile closes this gap and makes the functionalities of these complex and customisable systems available to technicians in the plant – in other words, where the maintenance work and the added value actually take place. Insight Mobile is based on the low-code platform Insight Control Panel from SPIE RODIAS and was developed according to the following basic principles.

‘Configurability: With Insight, customised processes can be implemented quickly and easily using the low-code approach. This provides customers with specific applications that precisely match their processes and workflows. This high level of customisability is complemented by a broad portfolio of templates, which form the basis for configuration.
Connectivity: Insight can tap into data from all kinds of systems – ERP, EAM or MES – and visualise it in an application. Thanks to this good integration into the system landscape, Insight can act as a link between d
Scalability: Insight follows a modular approach. As a rule, SPIE RODIAS often starts with smaller implementation projects with just a few use cases. This allows users to familiarise themselves with the system: This means that added value is created for the customer as quickly as possible. The system can then be customised further and further use cases can be added. In addition, there is long-term support for Insight Mobile to guarantee customers a future-proof solution.
Offline first: Thanks to the flexible and efficient online and offline functions, you can work from anywhere without having to worry about data loss.
Security: Regular penetration tests and the use of the OpenID Connect authentication level ensure the security of the data.’

Fast and affordable implementation

‘All maintenance processes can be mapped with Insight Mobile,’ according to the experts at Spie Rodias. There are out-of-the-box templates for order processing, inspections and tours, warehouse management, knowledge management and fault messages that can be customised. According to the developers, all other processes and use cases can be implemented quickly and cost-effectively for the customer.

Other maintenance-related use cases such as field service management or turnaround and shutdown management can also be mapped with this solution. ‘Insight Mobile is used successfully by numerous customers from various industries – from the automotive industry to logistics companies and supermarkets. Insight Mobile can be used successfully wherever maintenance and servicing is carried out. In total, there are now over 15,000 users working with Insight Mobile,’ emphasise the mobile maintenance experts from SPIE RODIAS in conclusion.

What use case do you have? We will be happy to support you.