Utilities are a crucial industry. People will always need electricity, natural gas, water, wastewater treatment, telephone service, cable TV and Internet access. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the most crowded of cities or in rural areas.
Many utilities have been using SAP Work Manager (formerly Syclo Work Manager) running on the SAP Mobile Platform. SAP has announced that it will end support of its on-premise SAP Mobile Platform in 2022. Utilities that had started with Syclo and transitioned to SAP Work Manager on the SAP Mobile Platform have been stuck in the crossroads of different supporting mobile application development technologies on a single platform.
When a turbine, pump or valve unexpectedly goes down, production quickly grinds to a halt and revenues stop flowing. Utilities often have a limited array of offerings. For example, a power company only provides electricity or natural gas. A water company delivers fresh, clean water. When these systems suffer outages, they must be repaired and brought back into production as soon as possible to preserve revenue streams. A water company can’t suddenly switch to making cars or delivering groceries to make up the shortfall. Therefore, machine and equipment maintenance is one of the most important functions at any utility operation.
The SAP Mobile Platform itself is built on an OData Web Protocol, while the acquired Syclo Solution sits on a different technology stack, powered by Syclo Agentry. After SAP’s 2012 Syclo acquisition, customers of that provider have been caught in the crossroads of different types of technologies, unhappily bouncing from technology to technology ever since.
SAP’s investments are now redirected to their cloud offerings on the SAP Cloud Platform with SAP Asset Manager becoming their latest offering. SAP Asset Manager intends to help customers address their field mobility on the Cloud and is a new and unproven solution with limited features and capabilities. SAP Asset Manager must go through the necessary maturity curve before it’s ready for prime time.
Utilities have been slow to embrace digital transformation for operations and maintenance. However, in the midst of the current COVID-19 crisis, several are realizing digital technologies and platforms offer many advantages over the present method of operations.
In the COVID-19 era, utilities need a highly robust, dynamic, agile, intuitive and user-friendly field mobility solution that can not only deliver a “Mobile-First” solution for the field worker, but also deliver real-time insights of field work to the back office and key executives. It’s now an imperative, and not a nice to have. At Innovapptive, we call this a “Connected Workforce” experience to help best-in-class companies rapidly embrace “Social Distancing” as an immediate priority. Stricter public health and government regulations require utilities to invest in a longer-term technology platform that’s capable of responding to such dynamic regulations and public health guidelines almost immediately.
The digital universe is evolving into ever-more intelligent, faster and cheaper smartphones and tablets with Wi-Fi capabilities. The market need for new platforms has also dramatically changed. Customers want to take full advantage of smartphones, tablets and infrastructure to have truly seamless experiences no matter their location.
Fortunately, there’s good news for forward-looking utilities to embrace new business models that are demanding them to adopt new policies, job instructions and standard operating procedures (SOPs) to adapt to crises such as COVID-19. This is a great opportunity for utilities to rethink their digital and technology strategy to keep their field workers highly productive, safe, practice “social distancing,” and almost immediately implement dynamic government and public health regulations and guidelines. Identifying continued opportunities to improve your bottom line is now a necessity in an unpredictable, uncertain and volatile world that we expect to witness in the next few years.
Innovapptive (see a two-minute video) is a mobile-first connected workforce platform provider that saves companies millions of dollars on utility equipment maintenance. It allows customers to quickly respond to stricter government and public health regulations and guidelines to make “Safety First” policies and standard operating procedures (SOPs) readily and digitally available as workflows to all utility workers. Utility employees can almost immediately practice and embrace “Social Distancing.”
Jemena, one of Australia’s premier utilities, utilizes mWorkOrder to manage their equipment maintenance. mWorkOrder allows Jemena to seamlessly connect field workers, back-office systems, machines and methods they can use to proactively manage maintenance programs to reduce unscheduled downtime, keep production running and improve operational efficiency.
Innovapptive gives utilities the freedom to modernize their operations without technology limitations, challenges and frustrations. Some of the benefits witnessed by our customers include:
Productivity
- 100% elimination printing, sorting, collating and distributing work orders
- 40% to 60% reduction in tech time for data entry
- 15% to 20% reduction in work order reworks due to incomplete information
- 40% to 60% increase supervisor/planner capacity for higher level activities
- 40% to 60% reduction technician overtime due to efficiencies gained
Maintenance
- 25% to 50% reduction in downtime and production delays
- 70% to 80% reduction in preventable failures
- 40% to 60% reduction in maintenance backlog
Compliance
- 40% to 60% reduction in worker compensation payments
- 70% to 80% reduction in cost of fines and remediation due to environmental incidents
- 70% to 80% reduction in safety incidents
mWorkOrder is a fully code-free, configurable, mobile-first solution that enables mining companies to:
- Get real-time alerts and push notifications on current plant/asset/equipment status and condition.
- Improve data collection and reporting during operator rounds, field inspections and risk assessments.
- Issue emergency work orders, prioritize tasks, and enhance planning and scheduling to respond quickly to issues before they become problems.
mWorkOrder (watch a 10-minute video) digitally connects a utility’s maintenance staff with site management and back-office systems through smartphones, tablets, scanners, wearables, drones, etc. mWorkOrder provides the maintenance staff the flexibility and agility they need to do their jobs efficiently. Supervisors, managers and directors, meanwhile, have immediate access to mission-critical information digitally collected in the field via desktop apps. Leadership can make informed decisions based on field-verified facts rather than intuition. With timely and accurate data, labor and resources can be more effectively deployed throughout the enterprise, reducing duplication of effort, preventable failures and unscheduled downtime.
If you’re looking for the same functionality and benefits you received in an EAM solution from Syclo – and more – schedule a free demo of Innovapptive’s mWorkOrder today by calling 844-464-6668 or by clicking here.
