The keys to creating value with an IWMS: maintenance

The principle

To manage requests, an IWMS has both a front office (a request portal) but also a powerful back office (to organize and automate the processes for processing these requests).

Concretely, this means that any request can be automatically directed to the right person whether they are an internal collaborator or a service provider. And , between the request and the contact person who will process it, all approval and validation or notification schemes are possible.

A request may correspond to corrective maintenance but in practice, the spectrum can be broader: ordering a service (small catering, moving a workstation,… ), order equipment (computer equipment, furniture, etc.), etc.

The first step is to define the catalog of requests. This involves defining, from the point of view of the different users of the portal, what the types of request are. The catalog will differ from one company to another and sometimes also from one site to another within the same company.

The catalog may also be different for an average employee of the company and a technician for example. This is the power of the IWMS: it will adapt the portal to the context of each user employee (their function, their site, their country, etc.).

The important is of course think about the organization of requestsfrom the point of view of the person who will create them. It will therefore be necessary to use vocabulary and design ergonomics which will facilitate the qualification of the request so that it is directed towards the right processing channel .

Next, you need to define this processing channel. The whole point of a catalog is to enable direct guidance towards the right person and thus avoid qualification steps which can slow down processing. Certain requests may thus be directed directly to the multi-technical service provider.

Others will require approval or qualification to continue their journey towards the relevant contact. The IWMS will allow you to create the different flows by distinguishing if necessary all the criteria (in addition to the type of request): the building, the emergency, the existence or not a contract to respond to demand,…

For the applicant, all this will be transparent and its request will be directed to the right channel by minimizing entries (possibility of geolocating a request on a plan for example) . And if two requests are similar, the tool will check if it is a duplicate (same problem in the same place for example) and the second requester may become a simple “observer of a request” and thus be notified like the original requester.

The importance of winnings is intimately linked to the existing organization: does the company have resources allocated to carrying out maintenance interventions?

Does the company rely on amain service provider (facility manager)?

Are resources assigned to the benefit control?

Nevertheless, whatever the case, the gains mainly result in the corollaries of better maintenance management: optimization of resources, compliance with regulatory constraints, a reduction in breakdowns (linked to preventive monitoring, powered if necessary by curative data) and of course, user comfort which results from this better management.

Depending on the maintenance organization choices within a company and in In particular, depending on the place of the maintenance providers in the organization, the role of the IWMS may be different. It is very often the size of the company which determines the internal human resources and the amount of outsourcing.

The case of VSEs and SMEs

In a context characterized by a virtual absence of internal resources dedicated to maintenance, the organization of preventive maintenance in an IWMS seems complicated. Each service provider will organize its interventions in its own CMMS.

It is always possible to impose the use of maintenance modules by service providers of the IWMS but this will nevertheless require a certain control and therefore means associated with the risk of finding that the service providers are not really playing the game (requests not closed, recurring interventions not informed, equipment repository not updated, etc.).

Requiring the use of IWMS for preventive maintenance will be even more difficult when the service provider does not have resources dedicated to the client. It is indeed difficult for him to organize interventions between his different clients in his own CMMS while at the same time ensuring double entry in the client's IWMS.

In this situation of almost total outsourcing, the implementation of a < strong>request management portal does, however, provide value. Automation will in fact make it possible to direct requests towards the right service provider thus limiting human means of regulation.

The case of mid-sized companies and large companies

As soon as the size of the heritage becomes significant, there are most often human resourcesto manage real estate and the work environment. It then becomes easier to centralize management in an IWMS and to impose its use on maintenance providers.

This is indeed the ideal scheme: the company remains in control of its strong>equipment repository and its maintenance processes thanks to the different modules of the IWMS and it is based on the IWMS to manage the proper delivery of services and manage the execution of the contract. The providers use the IWMS on a daily basis and internal resources focus on managing the services provided.

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