Taking maintenance engineering services to new heights with Siveco’s cloud-based mobility solution
Siveco China’s growing audit practice
This Customer Story features Siveco as its own customer: it really should not be a surprise to learn that a company constantly promoting the use of IT to support maintenance improvement has had a taste of its own medicine…
A significant part of Siveco China’s business consists in conducting maintenance assessments or audits. Such assessment can be focused on the organization, the facilities maintained, or both, and are often the first step into a largest project, which usually involves the implementation or usage of a computerized maintenance system (CMMS).
Obviously, third-party customers are always involved in such projects: examples of customers for which Siveco conducted assessments include retailer Ikea, automotive supplier ZF, chemical producer Arkema, utility Sino-French water, etc. In many respects, Siveco’s needs are really not that different from those of other technical services organizations.
Challenges of a fast-growing service organization
Like those of our customers who operate a central team of experts to support multiple sites, Siveco is faced with the challenge of servicing a growing number of locations with a limited pool of specialist resources. How to train newly recruited people, maintain quality of service and provide new services as needed as our business evolves?
Technical assessment services rely on an ever-increasing number of checklists, reports, and reference documents (templates, standards, know-how material). How to best share and reuse the accumulated knowledge? How to benchmark from one site to another?
The management of Siveco China quickly realized that the Excel sheets typically used in the industry could not meet the company’s objectives: the company’s experience auditing such Excel records used by various technical firms clearly disqualified this solution. Instead, it was decided to invest time and money in using Siveco’s own technologies internally.
Cloud computing and mobility in action
After years of trial and errors (not to mention delays as customers’ project always took the priority over internal needs), Siveco’s in-house support system has reached a certain maturity. It is based entirely on the company’s standard bluebee® and bluebee® cloud software.
When conducting site assessments, Siveco engineers are equipped with PDAs running bluebee® Surveyor, a unique tool to capture information from the field, record asset conditions, or even to build a complete facility or plant database by simply walking around and taking pictures.
All data is geo-located with its GPS coordinates, using the embedded GPS receiver in the PDA. When needed (for example during onsite data collection assignments) barcodes can be generated directly onsite for tagging, using a portable barcode printer.
Collected data and all follow-up actions (job requests, preventive jobs) are automatically updated into Siveco’s central database, running on the bluebee® cloud-based platform. They can then be processed and analyzed in the office (or anywhere with a web access) by Siveco’s back office team, specialists in various technologies (e.g. HVAC) or methodologies (e.g. FMECA).
Depending on the scope of contract, Siveco can then deliver a complete technical database, including photos, remedial actions to be taken, etc. in various CMMS formats: either by providing customer SaaS access to the Proxima maintenance portal or by uploading it into COSWIN or another CMMS installed at the customer’s site.
Immediate and longer term benefits
The Siveco IT platform has come to play a major role in supporting the company’s service offering. The seamless integration with the back office has proven immensely valuable to allow customers to immediately act on maintenance assessment, with detailed data available in their CMMS right after the audit. Siveco’s onsite data collection is completed in record time: for example, after a week-long site assessment, it took only one working day to build the facility database of the Ikea China office tower (a building with seven floors) including equipment structures, equipment condition, recommended remedial actions and optimized preventive maintenance plan.
Longer term savings derive from using the system as a standardization tool, to guide the audit teams in their work and to train new staff. As bluebee® cloud is essentially a specialized web portal, the system is set to become the company’s main know-how sharing tool, integrating data from all other subsystems (benchmarking, project and document management, CRM, e-learning).
According to Bruno Lhopiteau, General Manager of Siveco China:
“Experience shows that your own team can also be your toughest customer… In line with our company’s philosophy, we have been particularly picky with the ergonomics of the system. Our IT platform has proven to be a strong marketing differentiator and a tremendous productivity tool, while many larger companies still rely on inconsistent spreadsheets, office documents and even paper for similar technical assessments. This experience has been immediate reused for implementing similar systems for our large multi-site customers.”
