Strategy Analytics forecasts the global mobile workforce would be around 1.87 billion in 2022 accounting for 42.5% of the global workforce. Every industry is joining hands in this digital transformation. Vast opportunities are being unfolded revolutionising the way people work and remain connected across geographies. Affordability of smartphones and tablets coupled with cheap data charges further encourage organisations to leverage the digital workspace.
Mobility can also bring in competitive advantage in plants. Organisations who define a clear mobile strategy and start integrating it with their day to day processes see the following advantages. However, most organisations do not have wifi capability inside the plant and may not permit non-intrinsic devices inside process areas. Offline applications provide significant advantages in these cases. However, there are a few aspects to be taken care of for successful offline solutions.
Offline-First Approach
Organisations need to adopt an offline-first approach while designing applications for plant teams. It must be noted that plant personnel walk into their offices at least 2 or 3 times a day and this is good enough to sync the necessary information to their handheld devices before they hit the process areas of the plant.
Anytime, Anywhere
An offline app relieves you from being hooked on to your workstations and it enables you to spend more time at the plant and complete your work and update the necessary information directly from the field. Mobile devices make it easy to collect accurate data. Single Source of Truth Your CMMS systems continue to be the
single source of truth.
Offline applications have a local database that talks to your central systems and downloads the necessary data in a secure manner. Technicians further enrich the information based on the field activities and this information is sent back to the backend system, maintaining all references and integrity to the business objects of the backend systems.
Data Security
Data security is something which no organization is willing to compromise. Smart Organizations are thinking beyond device security and moving it to applications and Data. Organizations are thus able to put a secure wrapper or a framework over a set of applications that expose sensitive organization data. This helps by empowering IT teams to provision or revoke control from a central server. Such levels of security encourage organizations to Bring your own device ( BYOD) and Choose your own device ( CYOD) for enterprise related work.
Technicians should be able to complete the assigned tasks and record their observations directly from the field in an offline mode once they have all the necessary information on their device. Seamless integration of digital order processing into a CMMS back end system when they come into a network further contributes cross-functional optimization of the overall maintenance process. Deploying the right mobile asset management solution coupled with proper training will provide significant benefits for an organization that will definitely outweigh the initial hurdles faced during the implementation.
