Workforce Automation:  Mobile Computing for Asset Management

By Steve Hamilton, Executive Vice President, Sales for Syclo

Originally presented at IMC-2003- the 18th International Maintenance Conference

Abstract: 

Automating workflow activity through the deployment of handheld computers represents the best use of technology to increase productivity. The convergence of more powerful, lightweight palmtop PCs and intelligent software creates an opportunity for organizations to eliminate paperwork, arm technicians with more information at the point of performance, and capture work completion data for enhanced management functions. This presentation will explore the opportunities for dramatic productivity gains associated with mobile computing, including the immediate benefits of eliminating paperwork and increasing data collection to drive reliability-based asset protection programs.

I.                    Considering Workforce Automation:  Who are Your Mobile Employees?

Perceptions about workforce automation have in the past encompassed a limited scope of employees – specifically, those that have been traditionally defined as mobile such as field service technicians, traveling sales forces and inspectors. Mobile computing successes have proven that the mobile workforce as once was traditionally defined, needs to be expanded to include a larger subset of employees – including maintenance technicians who may spend their day within a single building, but rarely are stationed in a single location or at a desktop computer.

Mobile no longer means out of the building or in a van. Instead mobility occurs inside and outside the four walls; it occurs anytime an employee is not sitting in front of a network-connected PC. In fact, we can be as bold to say that a mobile employee is anyone who is NOT doing their job if they are at a desk or standing at a fixed terminal.

According to estimation by Syclo based on statistics from MRO Software and the Gartner Group, there is a worldwide market of 4-5 million maintenance technicians. This group as a whole presents a new set of benefits that can be delivered as a result of extending mobile devices to remote or the new, inclusive definition of “mobile” workers.

So what can mobile offer the maintenance world in terms of workforce automation? Mobile computing fundamentally changes the way technicians interact with their backend maintenance or asset management system. Instead of a paper-based workflow, where interaction with the system may only be session-based, as in when making updates, mobile provides the opportunity for workers to be highly interactive – constantly in and out of the system.

This drastic change in how maintenance technicians now interact with an EAM or CMMS system does not mean data entry responsibilities have merely shifted from the clerk and out to the more expensive resource, the technician. Rather, mobile changes how the application is used as a problem solving tool and a means of providing managers with timely, accurate visibility into actual work being performed on assets. The application moves from the back office and is mapped onto mobile devices so that it becomes an integral and natural part of doing a technician’s job.

The benefits of deploying EAM/CMMS systems are expanded to include a new subset of benefits that provide greater payback on the initial investment, including increased productivity, more/better data that allows for better planning and reporting, and an increase in technician success with access to data at the point of activity, which helps improve first-time fix rates. Over time, mobile has helped maintenance organizations increase asset touches, reduce maintenance backlogs, increase predictive maintenance and extend the overall productive life of critical assets.

II.                  Benefits of Mobile:  Workflow Improvement and Beyond

The most tangible of mobile benefits starts with eliminating data entry and paperwork. The cost savings can be found in the elimination of administrative overhead, and a gain in wrench time once technicians no longer need to be concerned about end-of-shift paperwork sessions, which last an average 43 minutes per shift. Furthermore, information at the point of activity helps improve productivity by giving technicians the data and answers they need, without contributing to excess foot traffic in search of asset history, etc. Finally, mobile helps increase the quantity and quality of data for decision support, in essence feeding your EAM/CMMS system.

While these benefits can often be appreciated as a matter of basic efficiency (error-prone paperwork piles up for administrators to deal with and is most certainly out of date by the time it is updated into my EAM system) there is a more significant price tag that comes attached to the inefficiencies caused by a paper-based workflow. Let’s examine what one pharmaceutical manufacturer discovered when they looked at the costs involved in completing a paper work order versus their newly deployed mobile computing solution.

The Real Cost of Paperwork

Paperwork is often seen as a necessary evil, an inefficient business practice that many organizations have become so accustomed to that they no longer view it as a problem that can be solved. But paperwork soaks up even more energy and resources than we realize, and creates an information bottleneck that decreases the potential benefit a manager could gain from being able to view real-time assignments and status of work orders.

A leading pharmaceutical company found that a paper work order had a lifecycle of eight key steps -- passing from a planner who generates, assigns and distributes work orders to the technician who notates work completed as he performs his job, and must later complete additional paperwork to be turned into a data entry designee. That data entry designee would then have to collect and review work orders for completion before entering data into the EAM system and filing the paperwork.  The total cost to complete a single paper work order was calculated to be $4.90. The pharmaceutical company conducted a comparative assessment of the new 4-step process required in completing a work order using mobile technology, and found the average cost per work order was $.84. This was a compilation of basic administrative overhead and a technician’s lost productive time, not factoring in the benefit to the overall maintenance operation when timely access to work order status and data was made available to supervisors for better reporting and planning. (See images 1 and 2)

How can you quantify the effort of your current work processes? First define the “life cycle” of a work order from the creation of the work order; through the assignment and management of an individual job; to the communication methods used to distribute work order information; to final reporting, whether that include only a paper hand-off or a combination of a call back, fax, data entry, etc.

Next consider the steps that are required specifically of the technician and which of those steps can be eliminated, such as trips to a computer terminal to enter updates after each work order, or the paper hand-off at the start of shift. Finally, quantify the effort of the current work process including the time to generate, distribute and report on work orders, and note the impact of eliminating entire steps. Not only will you gain in the discrete time to actually complete the activity, but you will also eliminate excess foot traffic and breaks in productivity that might revolve around socializing, taking a “break”, meandering, etc.

The Value of Information at the Point of Activity

Beyond the inefficiencies in workflow created by paper, consider the limitations of a static piece of paper.  Paper offers no interactivity to be gained from technicians who need access to specific information in order to more quickly and effectively complete their jobs. If data is missing from a paper work order, your technician must go in search of the information he or she needs to complete that job.

Consider that your organization purchased an asset management system to improve information flow in your organization, yet you have not even started to reap the benefits of such a system until you devise a way to effectively communicate vital information to the people who can most benefit from it. To work smarter, technicians needs more access to information – information contained in your EAM/CMMS system.

Currently, unplanned work order usually only provide technicians with the name and location of the asset to be repaired and hopefully a description of the problem. Planned work orders typically contain some more details, including a description of the preventive maintenance to be performed, the location of the equipment, the job plans, and maybe even warranty information. Yet the information is dated. With mobile access to an EAM/CMMS system, technicians can access the history of a work order, measurement history and action limits for a specific piece of equipment, warranty information, safety and job plans, bill of materials, parts locations, failure history and accurate equipment history – all up-to-date.

You can begin to quantify the value of having information in technicians’ hands by looking at the potential results. With work order history, first-time fix rates improve. With parts information and availability, foot traffic is reduced, as is the time to complete a repair.  Failures can be reduced with condition monitoring action limits available from a handheld device. Compliance and safety improvements can be made with access to job/safety plans at the point of performance. Duplicate work is eliminated because work will never be assigned twice, as is common when completed work orders were late in being entered into the EAM/CMMS system. Finally, up-to-date information can improve collaboration between technicians.

More, Better Data for Management: Planning, Scheduling and Reporting

An EAM system is only as powerful as the data in the system. Managers are left virtually blindfolded unless EAM data is kept accurate and up-to-date; their ability to make sound planning decisions is impaired. Effective maintenance strategies including Reliability Centered Maintenance are 100% dependent on accurate and timely feedback and recording of asset touches. Detailed labor data is necessary in order to determine where to use your limited human resources. There is always more work to do than people to do it. Having the accurate and timely information at hand is what allows a manager to direct their people wisely to where they will have the most impact on improving compliance, customer service or production.

Another increasingly urgent issue maintenance organizations face is coming from regulatory agencies, who have stated and demonstrated that work that is no reported has not been completed from a compliance perspective. In regulated industries, if maintenance managers cannot instantly run a report and prove that certain assets have been maintained or repaired, there will almost certainly be penalties or fines to deal with. Paper-based workflow cannot protect against regulator’s requirements like a mobile solution that includes e-signature or e-verification capabilities.

Moving Workflow from “Work, then Record” to “Record as you Work”

While understanding the high-level benefits of mobile, organizations may still have concern that end-user adoption may be slow and impair the prospective gain in productivity. There is a fundamental change that takes place when replacing a paper work order with a mobile device – one that can be referred as “Work, then Record” vs. “Record as you Work.” With paper-based workflow, technicians often sort their work orders, complete work and then set aside time at the end of the day to complete paperwork. With mobile, technicians are required to record information as they work, to close out one work order and move onto another.

There are some clear advantages to mobile providing interaction with the backend EAM system, that would rarely or never occur when technicians are tied to static, paper work orders. The fact that the mobile application is interactive means it can require users to enter necessary information, it can prompt action to be taken when measurements are within certain levels and it can also allow technicians to proactively initiate a work order. Important fields such as failure codes may be required to be entered before a work order can be closed, ending the all-too-common practice of entering failure codes based on “best recollections” or a simple “No Trouble Found”.  With more accurate labor figures, failure codes and parts usage being entered in a timely manner into your EAM system, managers can actually begin to develop maintenance strategies and manage inventory around failure information that is meaningful.   

III.                Mobile Delivers Payback for Maintenance Organizations

Conceptually, mobile can have a strong impact on several aspects of a maintenance organization. From providing the organization with accurate data for reporting and planning to helping end users be more successful at the point of performance, the tangible differences are easy to see, but what sort of overall impact can organizations really expect to see? Looking at several real-world deployments by maintenance organizations of varying sizes representing different industries, the results have been both significant and sustained over a several years that mobile has been deployed:

§         Rush Medical Center increased technician productivity by 27%

§         CB Richard Ellis increased call center efficiency by 57%

§         FleetBank increased work orders tracked by 206%

§         The U.S. Army with Johnson Controls reduced its work order process from 13 to six steps.

§         Hewlett Packard saved 43 minutes per day per technician per shift after eliminating paperwork from their maintenance equation.

§         Ameritech/SBC maintained service level agreements with 21% workforce reduction.

§         Air Liquide eliminated $300k a year in overtime

From Best Practice to Standard Operating Procedure:  Case Studies

Rush Medical Center, Chicago, IL

The largest medical facility in Chicago and one of the nation’s largest, Rush Medical Center, has 85 technicians covering over three million square feet in a 28-building facility. The group averages 120,000 work orders per year, maintaining everything from plumbing and fixtures to critical high-tech medical equipment.

Rush Medical was challenged with a 4-month work backlog, poor data collection and a paper-based workflow that hindered productivity with lengthy end-of-shift paperwork. The resulting delays in information being inputted into the organization’s EAM/CMMS system kept the department in a constant reactive mode, trying to catch up while planned work further went unfinished.

Rush Medical implemented mobile solutions for work order management and     maintenance inventory management. The organization deployed devices with docking cradles to preventive maintenance technicians and chose to have select corrective maintenance technicians equipped with devices that could connect to the backend database wirelessly.

Within four months, Rush had already seen full project payback. They estimate an average savings of $1 million per year, and five years after deploying mobile, they are still generating benefits. The current 85 technicians are doing the workload of 108 by gaining 300 hours more of wrench time, which was previously spent on paperwork and excessive foot traffic. Planned maintenance compliance was up from 25% to 90%. The overall gains in efficiency helped reduce reliance on outside contractors to complete work requests, while patient satisfaction rose from 60% to 85%. Technician turnover disappeared, clerical workers were designated to other more important tasks and inventory storage levels were significantly reduced, further helping to control costs.

“Since we deployed mobile, I can report a 28% increase in completed work orders – and that number is increasing,” said Richard Marzen, Director of Maintenance and Engineering at Rush.

            Hewlett Packard, Corvallis, OR

Hewlett Packard’s inkjet printer division in Corvallis, Oregon contains 11 buildings spanning 2.1 million square feet. With more than 10,800 assets to maintain and a staff of 45 trades people, HP decided to cut operating costs and improve the life of assets by implementing a Reliability Centered Maintenance strategy. The challenges were focused on maintaining asset uptime, because production line failure could cost HP up to $500,000 an hour. In order to better manage maintenance costs, the maintenance department had to increase productivity while maintaining the same staff.

HP deployed mobile devices that synched at the start of each shift and allowed workers to record progress while they worked. The result of mobile proved to be significant. HP estimates mobile drives $15M in potential quarterly savings from reduced downtime. Tradesmen have saved an average of 43 minutes per shift (equivalent to getting the work of five additional technicians per day without hiring any new people), which equated to a $4M annual savings for the company. The ratio of preventive maintenance to corrective work orders rose from 1:5 to an astounding 7:1. Maintenance costs were reduced overall by 25%, and HP was able to achieve project payback in just four months.

“By virtually eliminating paperwork, each tradesman is saving an average of 43 minutes per day – the equivalent of adding five technicians a day,” said Thomas J. Woginrigh, Plant Reliability Program Manager, HP.

            NiSource

The operators of one of the largest storage, transmission and distribution systems in the nation, NiSource supports 72 distinct companies and hundreds of gas end users in 11 states. With 13,000 miles of pipeline, over 100 compressor stations, 40 storage fields, and 3500 wells to maintain, the maintenance staff of 550 technicians and 30 supervisors needed the help of mobile technology to provide the visibility and information at the point of activity needed to maintain such a vast area of assets.

NiSource has unique challenges in providing timely reports for regulatory compliance, as well as audits from the department of transportation. The company also focused on efforts to eliminate technician travel time and data entry by removing paperwork from the equation, and to leverage the benefits of mobile to more quickly resolve emergencies. In addition, NiSource was looking to mobile to complete more planned work and increase asset uptime.

NiSource deployed a mobile work order management system to allow technicians to interact with their EAM system from the road. They chose ruggedized devices from Itronix, the Husky, which were able to communicate via phone lines or local area networks deployed out in the field.  Preparation time for audits was reduced from 19-28 weeks when using the paper-based workflow, to mere hours. The company gained in excess of 50 minutes per shift, per technician in productive time, equating to more than 100,000 hours per year. Field work orders increased by 30%, and the overall quality of life for technicians increased as paperwork and lengthy drives were eliminated.