This year, industrial manufacturers have learned a lot about what keeps businesses afloat during uncertain times. While there are many ways in which companies are looking to enhance operations, one area that has repeatedly stood out, particularly in the context of newly challenged operations and restricted budgets, is the need to carefully manage and leverage plant and field assets through the workforce.
Supporting the relationships between the workforce, business processes, and enterprise assets is complex, yet critical for industrial companies looking to optimize their business operations and drive profitability in this challenging environment.
Enterprise asset management platforms, from vendors such as IBM, Infor, Oracle, and SAP, provide the core infrastructure to manage and maintain asset information but, as Ram Ramasamy of Frost & Sullivan says, “these traditional point solutions have not kept pace with emerging requirements." In particular, traditional solutions have not kept pace with the mobile needs of the frontline workforce.
Key challenges for industrial companies include managing the costs of aging assets and knowing when to carry out maintenance with a particular focus on shifting from a corrective maintenance model to a planned one. And, of course, there is a focus on getting the most out of your EAM platform by creating a team culture around all of the maintenance activity. These are the reasons we have introduced our Webalo for SAP PM Framework, which automatically mobilizes maintenance requests, work orders, and standard operating procedures for plant and field maintenance teams using SAP PM.
Given these challenges and the urgent need to reduce person-to-person interactions and paperwork, we’ve focused Webalo for SAP PM on automating the maintenance workflow with notifications and task management, and enabling all jobs to be allocated, executed, and closed directly through mobile devices, without the need for workers to manage paper or log-in and interact with SAP directly. Webalo mobilizes all of the detailed reporting of key data points that are captured by maintenance teams on their phones, tablets, laptops, or desktops, including user information, work order status, and time and process variables, enabling management to track all maintenance activities in real time.
Like all Webalo apps, Webalo for SAP PM runs natively on Android and iOS smartphones and tablets so maintenance teams can make use of critical capabilities such as location-based services, integration with device cameras, support of barcode scanning for rapid equipment identification, and picture capture for fault identification. An off-line mode also ensures that work can continue in remote parts of the plant, or the field, where network connectivity is not always available.
Webalo is a platform designed for the industrial frontline workforce, and we are confident in the roll-out of our new framework for plant maintenance. Our no-code frontline workforce software platform, with its unique out-of-the-box capabilities for two-way integration with enterprise and industrial software platforms such as SAP, is designed to meet the needs of the workforce and accelerate time-to-value. Webalo for SAP PM extends these capabilities making it simple for engineering and maintenance organizations in industrial companies to keep plants safe, compliant, operational, and efficient and help maintenance teams get their jobs done right.
Watch the Webalo for SAP PM video, or StartNow to begin building your own forms and checklists for free, today!
