The digitalization of maintenance interventions

Friday 22 march 2019

Successfully transitioning to digital technology has become the number one priority for most companies, and the property maintenance sector is no exception to the rule. This is the case for maintenance service providers, such as heating engineers, plumbers, electricians, refrigeration specialists, elevator technicians, etc. they see that the organization of their business evolves rapidly, and a growing number of companies in the sector opt for digital and nomadic solutions. The selection of the tool remains essential to achieve the expected productivity and service quality improvements. The stakes are high because it is estimated that only 40% of companies are successfully achieving their digital transition.

Digital age planning

Manual planning systems, or via Excel or Google Calendar having definitely shown their limits, the first major change involves the use of a specialized tool in the planning of maintenance interventions. In this area, it is essential to distinguish between the two categories of interventions, curative and preventive, which do not respond to the same problems and must be treated in an appropriate way.

Curative maintenance interventions

In the context of a curative intervention some examples, such as repairing a water leak, a heating issue in winter, air conditioning in summer, the stake is urgency. We must immediately find the most suitable person to intervene, the closest to the place of intervention and available to make it. Responsiveness is the key element in such a situation, and digital solutions now make it possible to centralize information in one place, to know where the technicians are and to be able to quickly change the order and assignment of the missions. The latest generation applications automatically notify technicians and customers of schedule changes or any other modification.

Preventive maintenance interventions

Many maintenance providers also face problems in planning preventive interventions. The latter represents an average of 20 hours of work per week for companies and more than 30 hours per week for a third of them.

Preventive interventions represent a very significant volume of activity. They are generally spread over a large area with dense road traffic. Preventive maintenance contracts generate so much information that it can quickly become out of control if you do not have the right IT solution. It is necessary to centralize, memorize, order and distribute the interventions and to activate the visits at the right moment taking into account the availability and the requirements of the customer.

It becomes essential for service providers to have both complete and easy-to-use tool to organize the maintenance plans and the associated preventive interventions in an optimal and qualitative way. In addition to an important territory to cover, tertiary maintenance presents a very great variability of the periodicities. Thus a visit of maintenance or control can be daily or only take place every 2 years.

The range of services to be covered, like facility management, is also frequently very wide. However, reaching a coverage rate close to 100% is a crucial issue for service providers both in terms of quality of service and in terms of compliance with contractual commitments.

Yuman allows for the planning of curative and preventive interventions. Thanks to a global vision of the planning and incoming tasks, you can easily organize the schedule of each of the technicians. Mapping ensures the grouping of geographically close interventions in order to limit transport costs and time-consuming travels. Yuman also manages preventive maintenance contracts, distributing interventions and generating associated intervention orders.

Going digital is a major gain of time for the back-office, which frees itself from tedious, complex and time-consuming tasks, and for the teams in the field, it allows them to quickly take charge of the most urgent interventions, knowing that nothing that was planned will be forgotten.

Digitalize paper intervention vouchers

A vast majority of maintenance companies continue to use obsolete and outdated methods, including the use of paper intervention forms. Particularly time-consuming at the time of field entry or re-entry by the back office, paper vouchers must be definitively abandoned by companies wishing to limit errors, loss of information and save time and quality of service.

Digitalization makes it possible to optimize the working time of technicians in the field by offering them an intervention monitoring tool available from their smartphone. Thus, they can complete their intervention voucher more exhaustively than in the paper version: unlimited number of information, addition of photos and parts used in a single click, etc. If we take into account the fact that one technician out of two considers paperwork as the least pleasant part of his job, the digitalization of the intervention vouchers appears not only as a time optimization tool, but also as a powerful managerial tool.

Share information in real-time

The development of digital technology and especially the cloud has enabled the explosion of real-time information sharing. In the world of real estate maintenance where the priority is to remedy the most urgent requests and where responsiveness is a major competitive advantage, the choice of a digital solution can meet this need for information, whether issued by the technician or the customer, within very short deadlines.

Find the right digital tool

56% of companies see the digital switchover as an opportunity to boost their growth and generate significant productivity gains, and in 2018, one in two service providers said they were willing to invest between €50 and €100 per user per month in a CMMS solution. Publishers have fully understood the issue and are now able to offer increasingly successful software for each department of the company and in particular the intervention staff. However, the multiplication of tools can lead to greater complexity.

To succeed in the digital transition, the experts recommend focusing on two or three tools maximum, tailored to business specificities and broad functional spectrum. It is by taking this factor into account and in collaboration with experienced maintenance providers that we have developed Yuman, to create a tool that brings real value, exactly meets business needs and integrates with accounting software and pre-existing human resources in the company's information system.

We have designed Yuman as the digital solution for service providers. We centralize the information to facilitate the planning and monitoring of live interventions including a view on the mapping and travel technicians. Our solution is cloud and mobile to meet your requirements on the ground at any time. Adopting Yuman will certainly make you more efficient by simplifying and optimizing the exchange of information, which will necessarily help you to grow.

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

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