The 10 key points of CMMS
Tuesday 10 march 2020
Yuman takes up the challenge of offering the best CMMS on the market. The best because it is the most complete, the easiest to use and meets the expectations and needs of professional users. It is also the best because it offers all the services expected in this category of professional applications with a user experience previously unheard of in this sector.
In the first part of the article, we detail the essential elements of Yuman's Computerized Maintenance Management System, which are at the heart of it. It is the nerve center of the application to which it is very often essential to add the quotations, invoices, EDM and customer portal modules that we describe in the second part. Finally, we complete this list of Yuman's "must-haves": the forms and the tour optimizer. The perfect integration of these three parts is essential to have a complete mobile web solution capable of covering the processes of maintenance operators.
The heart of CMMS
1. Representation and management of estate and assets
Without a description of the intervention sites and the customers to which they are attached, it is not possible to start a CMMS. Customers, sites, and equipment make up the assets on which your technical teams work. Yuman will be the reference.
The customer database. Each file allows you to enter the customer's name and address, to generate a customer code in order to list him, to determine his role, his VAT number, the payment deadline (e.g. 15 days net), to add his contact details (email, telephone, etc.) and those of the related contacts. Similarly, it is possible to affiliate contracts to it and to make the customer/client record active or inactive. These files can be modified at any time from a desktop. It is also possible to update them from your mobile phone if you have authorized this possibility.
The sites and buildings file. It allows you to record the places of intervention by filling in all the necessary information such as the attached customer, address, assigned technician(s), cost of the package, displacement, applicable VAT rate, type of buildings. You can also add your personal observations.
In the equipment file you can establish a tree structure of the installations, equipment, sub-equipment associated with each customer and site. You can enter the brand of the equipment, its commissioning date, its warranty period, its status (i.e.: "in operation", "in degraded operation", "at a standstill", etc.).
If a maintenance activity is planned, it will appear directly on this master record.
Finally, a customer contact directory is accessible. Indeed, you can create a directory of contacts affiliated to your customers, that is, the person to contact in case of need to put in touch during an intervention or other. They are the contacts. In these customer contacts you will find: the title, name, e-mail address, fixed and mobile phone number, the link to the associated customer file and a comment for any notifications.
These different files adapt exactly to your own needs. You can complete the structure yourself with custom fields to include any data you deem useful. Powerful and easy to set up.
2. Management of troubleshooting interventions
The intervention module is essential. Users can formulate a request for intervention and then follow their progress, from their creation to their history, which includes preparation, waiting for parts, programming, and current realization.
This is why Yuman offers the programming of curative interventions, but also of preventive interventions, which we will discuss in the following section. Yuman is an intervention management software, and much more than that.
Troubleshooting, also known as corrective maintenance, consists of restoring the equipment to working order. The challenge is then to deal with the emergency by assigning the repair to the person closest to the place of intervention and most capable of intervening. Yuman CMMS will speed up your curative maintenance interventions thanks to planning, mapping, skills management and taking charge of the mobility of technicians in the field. In addition, equipment referencing will enable technicians to have all the information they need for curative intervention beforehand, in the event of a breakdown: such as safety instructions, need for special tools, technical notices, plans, detailed description, digital maintenance log, event history, etc.
Through this module, you will then be able to enter, process and follow up in real-time the curative requests, share knowledge, shorten your intervention and repair times.
3. Management of maintenance operations: maintenance
Yuman CMMS simplifies maintenance planning and management, particularly preventive maintenance. Let's remember that preventive maintenance is defined as the periodic and anticipated inspection and maintenance of equipment in order to reduce the probability of failure or breakdown. To do this, it is necessary to carry out a preventive maintenance plan, also called a preventive program. The latter is a tool for adjusting the preventive maintenance of installations, which includes all preventive interventions, periodicity, workload, and their level of maintenance. Then, the technician will be able, in the event of an incident or failure, to check whether the component is seen, checked or changed on a regular basis.
This functionality can be found in the Maintenance Range section of our application, which is a grouping of preventive interventions by daily to multi-year periodicity. It is presented in a preventive program table including the code/short name, the name, the details of the range and the estimated duration. Investing in a preventive maintenance strategy rather than the early replacement of your machines will bring you a considerable financial advantage.
Finally, you can create maintenance contracts with your customers. They are made up of three parts: the first is the customer details, the second is the maintenance periodicity part (start and end date of execution), and the last is the financial part which can lead to automatic invoicing.
Whether it is a curative or preventive intervention, you will be able to integrate them into your planning, available and modifiable at any time from the application.
4. Spare parts management: catalogues, stocks and supplies
Yuman holds the catalogue of articles and spare parts necessary for your maintenance operations. This catalogue can be built directly from suppliers' or distributors' catalogues. It is also possible to import and enrich one's private item base by adding products or importing data.
This database is displayed in table form including article number, brand, product designation, purchase price, sales price, and stock. The last column of the table allows you to identify on which database the article is saved (your private database or a database from a distributor's catalogue for example). A search bar is of course accessible to facilitate the product search.
Technicians can directly register via their smartphone the items used during an intervention, thus decrementing the stock. They also have the option of making a supply request to trigger a vendor order. This workflow will then ensure follow-up and receipt. Interventions can be planned before the materials are received and will only be triggered once the materials have been received.
The supply is also displayed in table format with the intervention number, requested quantity, unit, product description, date of request, order and receipt. Here, the last column informs about the status of the order (to be ordered, ordered or received).
In this table, you can insert filters of type "received", "to order" or "ordered" in order to directly access the desired information.
5. Mobile App - Smartphone or tablet
Compatible with iOS and Android, the application can be used on a smartphone or tablet in line with the work of mobile technicians. Indeed, this version allows receiving notifications on smartphone about interventions, to optimize the travel time thanks to the GPS guidance attached to Waze or to use the Start and Stop function during the intervention which measures the working time.
Thus, timesheets are automatically saved. Likewise, labor and travel costs are calculated directly from the application.
From the mobile version, technicians can access site information, the electronic maintenance logbook for installations, equipment, and forms. They can also consult attachments (plans, manuals and other types of documents).
This variant offers the possibility to capture intervention reports (preventive and curative) or assessments by voice recognition, or even to add photos and capture the signature.
Finally, the article database, the edition of spare parts in the intervention report and the article supply order are accessible. Of course, the creation of a follow-up intervention with parts order, for example, can be done from a smartphone.
Finally, invoices are created, generated and sent directly to the website.
6. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and statistics
The KPI (Key performance indicators) function gives access to graphical summaries of interventions but also a global report, by team, by technician, by customer, and by site, for a predefined period with the possibility of comparison between periods. This gives an overall view of the company's performance, evaluates the contribution of each person and helps to achieve its objectives.
Thus, it is necessary to be able to measure and monitor a set of indicators, the main ones being :
• Interventions (number, total time, average time)
• Preventive maintenance coverage
• Preventive/curative ratio
• Time on the road
• Response time
• Resolve Time
It is then essential to take into account that the achievement of your objectives will depend not only on your team (field officers) but also on the tools that will help them to carry out their task effectively. Good control of KPIs leads to success and also gives you a head start on your competitors.
Supplementary modules
Yuman also offers supplementary modules that ensure full coverage of your needs.
7. Management of installation and renovation work: quotes and building sites
Your technicians intervene to troubleshoot and maintain existing installations. But not only that. They also install new equipment or renovate existing installations. In the latter two cases, you will always need to send a quote to your customers before starting the work to get their approval. Only then will you be able to supply the necessary materials, mobilize and plan resources and start the work. These are the same customers. These are the same sites. It's the same equipment. It's the same spare parts. Very often, they are the same technicians.
So manage your quotes outside of Yuman? certainly not: managing your quotes with Yuman will considerably facilitate and speed up their creation and follow-up. Yuman will control your operating margins. He will transform the quote into a construction site after customer acceptance. He will manage supplier orders. He will plan and transmit the work orders to the technicians. He will issue invoices by work situation.
You can create a new quote from scratch, duplicate an existing quote, or use a template from the template library. It is also possible to pre-save lines to be re-used and complete books. All of these features make creating a quote very fast. Descriptive lines without prices can also be added and... it is, of course, possible to select items from the product catalogue.
Once the quote is finished, you send it directly by email to your customers from Yuman. You will know at any time the status of the email: sent/distributed/opened. As soon as the agreement is received, the status of the quote changes to "accepted". It has become a construction site.
Technicians can also make mobile requests and initiate the workflow. You then simply need to validate the request and transform it into a quote.
Site planned, equipment ordered, resources mobilized, client informed of progress. You control your operating margin.
8. Billing management
Invoicing of contracts is done automatically. Stored indices and revaluation formulas enable the automatic calculation of contract revaluations.
During the interventions, the operations carried out outside the contract are automatically valued in the background: calculation of labor time, travel expenses. Valuation of used spare parts. The invoice thus automatically constructed in the background can either be immediately transmitted by the technician from his mobile phone or be validated by his manager and sent by e-mail. You can also edit credit notes, schedule one-off invoices or duplicate invoices.
In addition, Yuman offers you the possibility to easily follow the status of documents for customers: in preparation, sent, accepted, invoiced, partially invoiced, etc. You will then be able to see and manage the list of quotes, which have been correctly delivered, or which remain to be delivered, in order to optimize the monitoring of your service offers.
Our CMMS allows you to customize billing parameters such as the cost of labor, the method of calculating travel costs and the applicable VAT rate to suit your way of working.
9. Document database management
With Yuman, EDM (Electronic Document Management) and CMMS fit together perfectly.
You can easily associate, share and archive scanned documents. The documents are then an integral part of the maintenance business processes supported by the application: enrichment of the technical asset base, management of interventions, preparation of a quote or an invoice, etc.
Saving documents such as notices, plans, parts lists, audits, inspection reports, etc. will allow them to be shared and made available instantly from the desktop application or mobile phone. Thus, the documents are accessible from the smartphones of the technicians in intervention. Managers and technicians have access to the information anytime and anywhere.
Documents can also be sent by e-mail or, via the portal: it's easy to share the ones you want and make them public to your customers.
10. The customer portal
Our solution's customer portal allows you to share information about your customers that they may need.
Your customers thus have their own online asset database, i.e. information about sites and equipment, including electronic service logs.
They have access to the mapping of their sites. They can follow in real-time the maintenance operations that you carry out on their behalf. Once the intervention is completed, they have instant access to the balance sheets, attached photos, parts consumed and all measurements and readings taken by the technician.
Quotations can be accepted online. Invoices can also be accessed from the Yuman platform.
The Yuman Touch'
...and other extra services with Yuman
Smart Forms
• Creating form templates
• Attachment of the model to the procedure, equipment or site
• Publication of models (active/inactive)
• Mobile form entry
• Signature capture
• Automatic report generation
• Notification and direct sending of the report to the client
• A continuous online history of all forms filled out for a site or equipment
• Forms are fully configurable
• Unlimited number of models
Automatic scheduling: tour optimization
Optimize your route plans while taking into account the constraints of your customers, operators, traffic and resources. Our automatic scheduling also intervenes in the optimization of trips and allows the location of technicians and their destination.
The goal: Schedule more appointments with less displacement. You gain flexibility and thus in the quality of service to your customers. Our solution offers you an automatic scheduling system, the main features of which are listed below:
• An automatic scheduling optimization algorithm
• Treatment of curative and preventive interventions
• Taking into account the workload of each technician
• Geolocation: taking into account the distance between sites and traffic times
• Consideration of customer constraints and possible periods of intervention
• Consideration of business constraints: skills and qualifications
• Consideration of labor regulations
Yuman: Web and mobile of course!
In this article, we have listed the services that any "state of the art" CMMS must offer. To conclude, we will add how these features should be delivered.
Web and mobile: need I remind you that today there is no salvation for users of a CMMS solution if it is not natively WEB and mobile?
Rights management: Yuman offers internal and external user account management and advanced security management, allowing the administrator to define roles and usage levels.
Multi-languages: a must for large projects: the CMMS solution has to be natively multilingual.
Imports/Exports: Being able to import and export all stored data such as customers, sites, equipment, items, interventions, maintenance plans, quotations, invoices, etc. from and to Excel is essential.
GDPR: the solution must be in full compliance with GDPR regulations (General Data Protection Regulation).
The ambition of Yuman CMMS is to provide more and more innovative functionalities, in an ever simpler way, to better meet the expectations of its users. Working continuously in close relationship with its community enables the team to achieve this goal.
By the way, our ambition is to offer an unparalleled user experience. Check it out right away: try CMMS for free. Within 2 minutes, the time it takes to create your account, you'll discover what's newest in this category of software.
You can also benefit from a demonstration led by one of our consultants: book a videoconference