10 Key Considerations when Choosing your Mobile Plant Maintenance Solution

Overview

With mobility seeping every spectrum of our life like never before, it is little doubt that organizations are spending huge amount of dollars developing a variety of apps to make our lives easier and simpler. Be it accessing email on an Android or using an iPhone to facilitate a video conference from a remote location, everything has become a reality with a click of a button. If Forrester Research’s predictions are anything to be believed, around 60 million tablets and 175 million smartphones will be in use by global workforce by 2015. This is a clear indicator about how mobile has a major role to play in our professional work lives, considering that the major contributor to this new found interest would definitely be the industrial sector, particularly in asset intensive or manufacturing industries.

As already mentioned, mobility in the manufacturing environment has a key role to play with a plethora of activities including daily plant maintenance activities that work with enterprise asset management systems. This way organizations can save time and enhance efficiency by helping them to work anywhere, anytime without the need to constantly be attached to their desktops. This blog throws some light on the benefits of using mobile devices in routine plant maintenance activities.

How can mobile enhance plant maintenance?

Though many industries have recognized the importance of empowering their workforce with mobile devices, however, it is imperative that organizations clearly define the mobile strategy and identify why it can benefit their organization. This is particularly true in case of plant maintenance.

Can integrating mobile with day to plant maintenance activities really yield benefits? The answer is yes, and how is it possible? Take for an instance, a worker who has a tablet to help him gather field information instantaneously – not at the end of the day. This will enhance the pace at which the work orders are updated and completed.

So, what are the functional and commercial aspects that we need to look at when planning to purchase a solution for plant maintenance?

1. Access to real-time data

Instantaneous access to information including real-time notifications and confirmations pertaining to various transactions such as breakdowns is one of the factors to consider while looking for a mobile solution for routine plant maintenance. By offering real-time updates, technicians can save hours of work, while working on desktop, providing an accurate status of progress tracking of a work order.

2. Access to routes and inspections

Maintenance supervisors and quality inspectors should be able to use the mobile app on their tablets and smartphones to create, view and update maintenance routes and measurements points in real-time. Apart from that, the solution should help them respond and approve notifications on the fly, when they are out of the plant floor. This way, they can enhance the wrench time and provide an accurate picture of the completion status.

3. Simple and user-friendly interface

This should be the primary goal of a good mobile application, considering that a mobile screen is much smaller, compared to a desktop screen. This means, companies need to identify what key aspects of their daily maintenance process are to be displayed on the interface. It is always better to display lesser information with quicker access and updates, rather than having too many buttons or text, creating lot of clutter and confusion.

4. Ability to upload pictures

Instead of typing endless text to provide the description of the equipment, a good mobile application for plant maintenance should have the ability to attach pictures associated with equipment breakdowns, thereby creating a better visibility on equipment reliability.

5. Barcode scanning

This feature helps to identify the history of a piece of equipment under consideration as also helps to search for parts. One step ahead is the geo-tagging feature that lets you identify the exact location of the equipment, which is quite useful during tracking and auditing of assets. A good mobile solution should be able to provide this barcode scanningfeature with the help of camera available on a smart phone or a tablet, saving lot of search time and avoiding information inaccuracies.

6. Search options

A good mobile solution should provide a user-friendly search options for the availability and location of spare parts. This way, it maximizes user’s efficiency, while improving the repair timelines.

7. Document viewing

A right solution should provide access to key documents such as work order instructions, technical documents and safety instructions in variety of formats including PDF. This way field technicians and plant personnel can make informed decisions about work orders and assignments, while considerably cutting down costs on printing.

8. Quick deployment

A good mobile solution should be able to quickly adapt to an organization’s infrastructure, enabling quick deployment and minimizing implementation timelines.

9. Data Security

Most of the organizations are concerned about the security of their data, particularly when they are dealing with costly equipment and assets. A right solution should be able to address these issues and provide an extra layer of data security, without posing hindrances to the existing functionality, while executing day to day maintenance tasks.

10. Cost aspects

Last, but not the least is the cost aspect that typically crops up in our mind – how much does a good mobile work order solution cost and will my organization be able to afford it? Hence, a good solution vendor cannot ignore this aspect, irrespective of the number of features that the solution can offer, as most of the companies are in the mid-level segment, looking for a solution that is affordable including costs related to installation, maintenance and future upgrades.

Innovapptive’s mobile order solution – mWorkOrder

Innovapptive Inc., a premier SAP certified partner had evaluated and understood the various pain points and challenges encountered by typical asset intensive industries and developed a cutting edge mobile work order management solution – mWorkOrder. mWorkOrder leverages the SAP’s Plant Maintenance module at the back-end to deliver a consistent, reliable and a productive asset maintenance experience across a wide range of industries.   It empowers maintenance technicians and quality inspectors to work safely and productively relating to installing new equipment or maintaining, inspecting and repairing existing assets. Apart from that, the mWorkOrder app also mitigates the risk of injury by helping workers complete safety checks and follow safe work practices.

Value Drivers

• Receive and update work orders.
• Get directions with GIS and GPS.
• View installed-base listings and access equipment, details, dependencies and maintenance history.
• View interactive part schematics (with the SAP Visual Enterprise Viewer).
• Follow guided workflows, steps and instructions.
• Install and geotag equipment.
• Perform maintenance, inspections and repairs.
• Track and automatically report status, progress and location.
• Capture readings, measurements and photos.
• Record problems, actions, time, parts and materials.
• Create work orders and notifications on the spot.

  Business Benefits

• Extend and improve asset life and reliability.
• Improve plant, fleet and equipment performance.
• Improve workforce safety and productivity.
• Minimize accidents, failures and outages.
• Reduce unplanned downtime and maintenance backlog.
• Improve first-time resolution rates.
• Enhance the efficiency of warehouse, plant, field and accounts payable personnel.
• Ensure assets run at peak performance with shorter response times and timely maintenance.
• Complete safety checks and adhere to safe practices.

If you would like a demo of Innovapptive’s portfolio of Native or Web based mobile solutions, please click on the link. Alternatively, if you would like to discuss with an Innovapptive solution expert, you can reach out to us by emailing us at sales@innovapptive.com or you can reach a sales representative at (713) 275-1804.

Reducing TCO for Mobile Enterprise Asset Management

Introduction

Asset Management plays a vital role for any organization, be it manufacturing, IT, Health care, etc. Managing the assets in the right way is itself an art that involves prudent balancing of costs, opportunities and risks against the desired performance of assets to accomplish the set organizational objectives. In addition to that, Asset Management also plays a crucial role in enabling an organization to examine the need for, and performance of the assets and its associated systems at different levels.  Simply speaking, it implies taking the right decisions and optimizing the delivery of value.

This high level reliance on assets, coupled with an innumerable market trends and technological advancements is paving way to a systematic and a coherent enterprise asset management (EAM). EAM is slowly gaining ground, particularly in asset intensive industries, where typical challenges like managing the complete life-cycle of assets, tracking their location to ensure assets are not missing or stolen, and ensuring upgrades and system deployments are adequately addressed. Since most of the field personnel working in such industries are remotely placed, enabling an effective communication and data sharing mechanism is one of the core objectives of EAM. With a comprehensive EAM, you can  gain valuable insights and gain control to tightly align with your organizational goals. Asset management helps in organizing comprehensive programs for preventive, predictive, routine and unplanned maintenance. This way, you can control costs and increase asset uptime, thereby reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Confluence of EAM and Mobile Technology

As this new approach is slowly gaining ground, one of the key most technological advancements is the usage of mobile devices and apps for managing the assets in the enterprise. Integrating mobile devices and apps with current asset management solutions can save time, minimize errors and streamline processes – reduce operational expenses and boost the bottom lines. In addition to that, mobile EAM contributes to high ROI, since operational improvements minimizes excessive inventory and maintenance costs. A one step ahead in this area is integrating bar code scanning technology with mobile technology to ensure seamless, transparent and a reliable asset & inventory management process. EAM encompasses the management of an organization’s entire portfolio of assets across various processes including adding/minimizing the equipment, replacement, over-hauling, redundancy setup and maintenance budgets. The net result is the decreased total cost of ownership (TCO) that is one of the primary objectives of mobile EAM.

Innovapptive’s contribution in the EAM space

 Work order management and inventory management are key technologies that enable organizations to manage, maintain and upgrade their assets and inventory to derive a slew of benefits – helps in gaining maximum usage from items and ensuring that they run at optimal efficiency. In addition to that, one of the crucial objectives of a good EAM solution is to ensure safety of an organization’s remote workforce, while providing access to critical information that they need most to ensure high productivity of its personnel.

From the above backdrop, Innovapptive Solutions, an SAP partner has taken a lead to meet the ever growing demand of mobile apps in this fast growing asset management spectrum. It has collaborated with SAP to deliver two cutting edge solutions – – mobile inventory management (mInventory) and mobile work order management (mWorkOrder).

If you would like a demo of Innovapptive’s portfolio of Native or Web based mobile solutions, please click on the link. Alternatively, if you would like to discuss with an Innovapptive solution expert, you can reach out to us by emailing us at sales@innovapptive.com or you can reach a sales representative at (713) 275-1804.

Let’s explore these apps briefly and understand how these solutions can create an impact in asset intensive organizations.

mInventory

 The mInventory mobile solution is designed to support the existing SAP users, such as warehouse clerks, managers, store managers, or order processing and delivery managers to seamlessly manage and run all critical inventory management transactions such as stock overview, goods issue, goods receipts, picking, unpicking, packing, unpacking, bin to bin movements and inventory cycle counting to name a few. The solution offers a seamless, intuitive and an enriching inventory management experience at the comfort of their smart phones or ruggedized mobile computers or handhelds.

Using mInventory, you can perform day to day inventory transactions through hand held devices, smart phones or tablets by simply accessing the master data and transactional data of the SAP inventory or extended warehouse management module, thereby helping you manage the core spectrum of transactions within the scope of supply chain management (SCM) space. With mInventory, you can ensure real-time transaction processing, enhanced data accuracy and improved mobility and convenience.

Business Benefits 

• Perform physical and cycle counts quickly and achieve 98% accuracy of inventory levels.
• Streamline inventory cycle counting and reduce number of FTEs for cycle counting.
• Speed receipt and back-order reporting to and from shipping/receiving by over 35%.
• Reduce inventory carrying costs by 5 – 10%.
• Manage physical inventory movement in real time and improve inventory accuracy by 30%.
• Eliminate investments in expensive RFID guns and consoles to tighten your supply chain, service responses and order fulfillment.
• Streamline goods receipts, issues, transfers and returns.
• Streamline data processing on receivables.
• Manage rolling inventories, satellite storerooms and truck/trunk stock.

 mWorkOrder

mWorkOrder leverages SAP’s Plant Maintenance module at the back-end to deliver a consistent, reliable and a productive asset maintenance experience across a wide range of industries. It empowers maintenance technicians and quality inspectors to work safely and productively relating to installing new equipment or maintaining, inspecting and repairing existing assets. Apart from that, the mWorkOrder app also mitigates the risk of injury by helping workers complete safety checks and follow safe work practices.

Using mWorkOrder, a quality inspector can notify their field personnel and technicians about an asset that needs maintenance/repair or even update an existing work order to let their field personnel accomplish a specific maintenance task of an equipment/machinery in their factory premises. On the other hand, field technicians can constantly keep track and update the status pertaining to their notifications/work orders or even fill up time sheets to keep track of the time spent on their respective activities.

Business benefits

• Streamline enterprise asset management.
• Lower overall costs by improving safety and productivity in the field.
• Avoid unexpected downtime with proactive dispatch and scheduling of work orders.
• Extend and improve the asset life and reliability.
• Increase plant, fleet and equipment performance.
• Reduce unplanned downtime and maintenance backlog.
• Increase efficiency of warehouse, plant, field and accounts payable personnel.

From the above discussion, it boils down to the fact that mobile asset management solutions are the order of day with asset intensive companies religiously embracing them like never before. Apart from offering a seamless user experience, it provides a plethora of benefits including providing a holistic view of their assets, ensuring seamless tracking, reducing maintenance costs and improving the shelf life of their assets. This translates to greater revenue generation, higher return on investment and above all reducing the total cost of ownership.

Combining SAP Single Sign On (SSO) and Touch ID for seamless mobile user experience

We are inundated with a myriad of mobile apps in our day to day life that are aimed to improve our
overall quality of life and transform the way we can accomplish day to day activities with the click of a button. However, the paramount concern that most of us face today is the data security and protection and the challenge is how we can accomplish this in high end devices such on smartphones and tablets.

However, with latest technological innovations, even security and data protection has gone innovative with mobile device manufacturers resorting to unique methods to secure one’s device or data. One such feature that Innovapptive has incorporated into their entire mobile application portfolio is leveraging SAP single sign on (SSO) capabilities and Apple Touch ID technology, which is one step further in high end data security.

SSO authentication and why it is so important?

As applications and data migrate to the cloud, the average workforce is experiencing an increase of user accounts and their passwords. With this change, organizations are consistently challenged with the maintenance and security of users access. SSO technologies can come handy in such complex security scenarios, enabling users to authenticate at a single location and with a single account to access a wide range of services. SSO shares centralized authentication servers, which all other applications and systems access for authentication purposes and integrates this with techniques to ensure that users bypass the need to type their credentials more than once. The net result is a seamless user experience for the end-user with critical visibility and control for their organizations.

Some of the core benefits of SSO include:

• Minimizes password chaos (remembering multiple passwords for accomplishing multiple tasks).
• Minimizes time spent to retype the passwords for the same identity.
• Reduces IT costs on account of minimized number of IT help desk calls pertaining to passwords.

A further enhancement to the traditional SSO authentication for mobile devices is setting up a passcode for the app that adds an extra layer of security. But why need a passcode in the first instance? There are ample chances of your password getting tampered and posing the vulnerability threat, since you need to retype the login credentials repeatedly, particularly when you are not using your app for a considerable amount of time (idle state). Also, there are chances that an unauthorized user could access your application if they were able to obtain physical access to the device (if were lost for example, but not password protected).

This concept of passcode has already been implemented for the entire Innovapptive mobile app portfolio to protect from unauthorized access to the enterprise users’ data.

Touch ID experience

Recently Apple introduced the Touch ID feature on iPhone 5S, which is the most eye-catching and an evolving security feature. Touch ID is a new security feature, wherein it provides iPhone two-factor authentication that combines passcode (SSO authentication) with fingerprint security.

What is Touch ID?

Touch ID is the fingerprint sensing system to ensure that secure access to the device is swifter and simpler. This technology reads fingerprint data from any position/angle and comprehends more about a user’s fingerprint over a period of time. And at the same time, the sensor continues to expand the fingerprint map, since additional overlapping nodes are identified with each use. With Touch ID, more complex passcode becomes far more practical, as users need not worry typing the password frequently. Apart from that, Touch ID also mitigates the inconvenience of a passcode-based lock – it’s not replacement, but by offering secure access to the device within the defined boundaries and time constraints.

In order to use TouchID, the basic pre-requisite is that users must set up their device in order to ensure that a passcode is necessary to unlock it. When Touch ID scans and identifies an enrolled fingerprint, the device unlocks without requesting for the device passcode. This means user can bypass the passcode to make it more user-friendly and convenient. But, from a security perspective, is it right to bypass a passcode?

Experts believe that passcode still needs to be consistently used instead of Touch ID under the following circumstances:

• When you had just switched on the device or restarted.
• When you haven’t locked the device for more than 48 hours.
• When the device has received a remote lock command.
• When there were five unsuccessful attempts to match a fingerprint.

When the Touch ID is enabled, the device gets locked immediately when the Sleep/Wake button is pressed. When there is a passcode-only security, many users set an unlocking grace period to avoid having to re-type the passcode each time the device is used. With Touch ID, the device gets locked every time it goes to sleep.

However, TouchID though sounds good and innovative, it still lags behind and is at odds with single-sign-on (SSO) solutions, which still are the traditional favorities for the enterprises, leading to enhanced efficiency, based on the assumption that the device is already trusted by that enterprise.

So, that way it becomes imperative to combine TouchID with SSO authentication to have a seamless user experience.

The concept of TouchID in the enterprise is still new and is yet to take off among other major device and app developers – though app passcode has considerably gained ground and has become an undisputed leader in data security. Innovapptive now offers Apple TouchID technology as a standard feature  on all its SAP certified apps – a step that may redefine the way the app data is accessed and distributed.

If you would like a demo of Innovapptive’s portfolio of Native or Web based mobile solutions, please click on the link. Alternatively, if you would like to discuss with an Innovapptive solution expert, you can reach out to us by emailing us at sales@innovapptive.com or you can reach a sales representative at (713) 275-1804.

New enhancements to Innovapptive’s Rapid App Configurator Engine (RACE™)

The trend of processing and consuming information anywhere and anytime has created enormous expectations from customers’ enterprise IT teams to provide On-Demand mobile solutions to transact business. However, meeting this demand is next to impossible for IT, if a mix of pre-packaged mobile apps and custom mobile app development is not considered within their long term strategy. Unfortunately, most of the commercially available pre-packaged apps provide none to minimal customization options, making these pre-packaged mobile apps a non-viable option.

It is here that Innovapptive’s Rapid App Configurator Engine (RACE) pitches in to empower your IT teams to manage your evolving and unique business requirements across core lines of business such as Sales, Finance, Supply Chain, Operations and Field Services. Irrespective of the size of your enterprise or the type of the infrastructure that your organization currently maintains, we at Innovapptive will help towards achieving your goal to put ahead of your competitors.

Existing landscape of Innovapptive’s RACE

Innovapptive’s entire mPower Apps Suite comes with RACE that provides your IT teams the flexibility and agility to achieve SAP mobile customizations with simple configurations, eliminating any code changes – within minimal time and zero investment, translating to 40% rise in operational efficiency.  With RACE, you can activate or deactivate the required modules and transactions, based on your current business scope. Apart from that, it empowers your IT teams to accelerate your enterprise time to market without becoming a bottleneck.

If you would like a demo of Innovapptive’s portfolio of Native or Web based mobile solutions, please click on the link. Alternatively, if you would like to discuss with an Innovapptive solution expert, you can reach out to us by emailing us at sales@innovapptive.com or you can reach a sales representative at (713) 275-1804.

New Innovations in existing RACE to create value to our customers

However, the present landscape of RACE is limited to only activating/deactivating specific modules and transactions (adding/removing/re-sequencing new fields and other related logic). The new generation RACE aims to redefine the way customizations can be accomplished – customers can dynamically create new modules as well as UI screens as per their specific requirements, which is a major value addition, all without the necessity to change a bit of the code.

 Backend process/configuration to accomplish this new logic

1. Create modules dynamically using AppScoping configuration.

In the Data Browser: Table ZAPPSCOPING Select Entries screen, enter the appropriate values under the respective column fields such as Appid, Application Name, MODULE_NAME, Title Name, DESCRIPTION and MODULE_TYPE.(Please refer Notes).

Note: 

• The data structure that you create here is mapped to the existing RACE landscape.
• Table Description:

Column field	Description
Appid	Application reference id (Here mInventory app is taken as the reference application)
Application Name	Name of the referenced application.
MODULE_NAME	Name of the referenced module
Title Name	Name of the referenced title
DESCRIPTION	Description of the module (what this module does?)
MODULE_TYPE	“S” (Standard) or “C” (New Module)

2. Build the UI screens dynamically with elements based on configuration in SAP NetWeaver Gateway.

•  The value TOCOLLECTIONDYNAMICRACCOLLECTION under DATA_PROVIDER column field is used to dynamically retrieve the data.
•  Thus the data within the TRANSFERORDER module (as illustrated in Figure 1) gets retrieved in the Data Browser: Table APPSCREEN_CONF Select Entries screen including screen names, screen types, elements, element type and UI labels.

Note: Elements here refer to UI elements such as buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc.

3. Retrieve the data dynamically based on data provider from RACE.

Front end data flow process illustrated on a mobile screen

The following sequence of screen shots illustrate the data flow taking the example of Innovapptive’s mInventory application.

1. Open the mInventory app and in the Login screen, type the username and password in the respective fields and tapLogin. 

2. In the Home screen:

• The respective configured modules: TRANSFER ORDER and PURCHASE ORDER (as illustrated in the backend procedure) gets displayed here.
• Tap PURCHASE ORDER to display the transactional data available within this module such as purchasing document number and company code (refer figure 6).

3. In the PURCHASE ORDER screen:

• Tap the appropriate transaction to get the detailed information of the transaction record including the available line items for this transaction.
• Tap the appropriate line item to view the detailed information of that line item.

More innovative features in the offing

• X509 certificate: Configuration of X509 certificate will be accomplished directly into the user’s mobile to do away with the Login button. User can directly open the application without the necessity of typing in login credentials to authenticate.
• Localization options: Desired language option can be configured so that all label names, screen names, etc are translated into the desired language that is configured.
• Postings: User’s mobile can be configured to enable direct posting of data to the backend. In other words, whatever configurations that user executes in his/her mobile, all such configuration data will be posted directly to the backend.

 How this new innovation adds value to Innovapptive’s Customers?

• Eliminates coding efforts completely.
• Eliminates the efforts required to configure the backend.
• Offers the opportunity to create new mobile apps within the shortest possible time.
• Eliminates the need to hire additional skill sets (Mobile UI/UX designer, iOS, Android or Appcelerator developer).
• 20% direct cost savings through enhanced productivity.
• 40% rise in productivity to drive higher operational efficiency.