There has never been a better time to add a mobile solution to your Maximo operations. Technology is better than ever before, there are more choices, implementation is easier, data and analytics are more important, greater efficiency is essential, and worker safety is paramount.
ROI
Every organisation has different goals and it’s not immediately obvious how one can turn these into financial terms to generate a traditional ROI. For example, customer satisfaction is often cited as an example of a soft or intangible benefit that you can’t measure in financial terms. Faced with a similar situation many years ago at one of the leading mobile operators across Europe, it didn’t require that much investigation to be able to link customer satisfaction to “churn” a term used to express the number of clients that moved away from the service provider when customer satisfaction dropped.
Churn is very easy to measure in hard Euros! Similarly, many companies deploy mobile technology for regulatory reasons. For example, performing statutory safety inspections on their assets or checking calibration on measurement devices. Whilst it may not be immediately obvious how one assesses the benefit of performing these checks, all you have to do is to consider the consequences of not performing the checks. Ask a pharmaceutical company the cost of shutting down an entire production line due to failure to calibrate key equipment and you can derive the numbers pretty quickly.
Don’t Wait!
The correct time to Go Mobile is right now. The sooner you do, the quicker the benefits will be realised. Mobile implementation projects are much shorter than they used to be as the integration technology has improved. There is no longer a need to wait for the next Maximo upgrade or other major project to be completed, they can be run in parallel. In fact, including Mobile in a major project where business processes or Maximo usage are being disrupted anyway makes the most sense. Why train technicians or storeroom staff to use a new interface in Maximo and then move them to mobile soon after? Instead, skip a step and train them directly on the mobile system.
It used to be the case that the mobile element of the system would be directly impacted by any Maximo upgrade, and vice versa. That is no longer the case in most situations and while consideration must be made, it is not a showstopper. Most mobile systems can be installed in the older version of Maximo and will then be carried forward in the upgrade with only minor tweaks necessary.
Traditionally the cost of any project has been entirely CAPEX and so usually coming out of a single budget/budget year. Nowadays, software is more often procured using a subscription model, even if installed on premise rather than in the Cloud. A similar approach can be taken to the hardware using managed lease arrangements and even for some of the services associated with the implementation. This allows organizations to map the cost directly to the ongoing operating costs and also split the cost across multiple budget lines and years.
Vetasi Mobile Centre of Excellence
At Vetasi we recognise that one solution absolutely does not fit all and so our Mobile Centre of Excellence works with multiple technology partners to deliver solutions that are just right. We work with the customer to define the need and match solutions that can deliver the best match within budget. More than just offering software packages, we bring a wealth of experience across all industries garnered over more than 30 years of Maximo experience (hundreds of years if you add all our respective years together!).
Workshops
The time spent prior to implementing a mobile solution is invaluable. Vetasi can help inform this process with tailored workshops (remote right now of course). If you want to learn more about what a mobile solution can do for your organization then let us know. A simple, one-day Introduction to Mobile workshop might be enough to set you on a path to success. We can also offer multi-day Mobile Selection workshops or even full-service Tender Support. In addition to looking at the mobile software we talk about what you can do to optimise the system to maximise benefit (planning, scheduling, etc) and also hardware options.
Approach
Vetasi will support your preferred approach to the implementation and project and has experience across multiple methodologies. In most cases an agile approach is the most efficient way to deliver the software but in larger implementations a combination of the traditional waterfall with an agile development phase is appropriate.
We believe that you have to see the solution before you buy it, and even get your hands on it and try it out. We work with our partners to provide an excellent pre-sale experience that will go from off-the-shelf demos to even a try-before-buy period with the software installed in your own Maximo environment.
It is recommended that for anything more than a simple project the total implementation is broken up into phases with a minimum of Proof of Concept (POC), Pilot, and roll out. For larger and more complicated sets of requirements the roll out could be broken out further into a series of iterative sprints starting with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and followed by further releases to Production, adding new features and workflows each time
There is no Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) mobile solution that will meet all of your needs unless your processes are very simple and exactly in line with a basic Maximo implementation. To that end, you can expect some level of configuration to be needed. Whether that is achieved through configuration or code-modification will depend on both the system and the requirements. When it boils down to it, there is a very blurred line between the two anyway. We strongly recommend that you do not hamper your solution selection with requirements like “must be fully configurable with all requirements met without having to write any code.” This is a good thing in principle, but it does not carry the benefits that are associated with it and usually lead to a compromised final solution.
Conclusion
A good mobile solution can add value immediately to the business. It can be implemented quickly and easily and then continuously improved through subsequent releases. Moving technicians and other operators from paper to mobile devices can also have a huge impact on safety concerns in the Covid era. At least two office visits per day per person can be eliminated, not to mention the paper and time that will also be saved.
Share this Blog Post: