Throughout the EAM webinar series, the team has looked at ways your agency can make the most out your EAM investment. From using EAM for all the other things at your agency that don’t have wheels to giving technicians better tools to get their job done, we’ve touched on all the ways Trapeze EAM helps your agency maintain all of its assets. In the next webinar of the series, I’ll be talking about how EAM Mobile brings all of this together in an easy-to-use and easy-to-deploy tool for smartphones or tablets that gives technicians more than just what needs to be done, it gives them tools to do it better.
Brett alluded to EAM Mobile in his post with scanning parts and taking photos of damage, but that was still in the garage. Now we’re focusing on field technicians who have to work on everything from shelters to track to signals to vehicles, people who don’t always have the luxury of carrying a laptop into the field. In this in the series, I’m diving into everything you need to know about EAM Mobile and how it can seamlessly fit into your agency.
Maintenance and repairs, managing work orders in general, has been a paper-based process for decades, but we all know how inefficient that is. EAM Technician Portal can reduce or eliminate a lot of the paper needed to track and update the work. In the field, however, technicians still often have to carry paper schedules and work orders to track their work and then enter it into EAM when they get to a desk or computer.
EAM Mobile isn’t just for maintenance and technicians, it integrates with your parts department and inventory too. Techs can order parts from the app and those are pushed out to the parts department and made into easy-to-follow pick lists. No more paper scrawls or wasted trips back and forth for parts.
EAM Mobile puts all the tools in Technical Portal onto a smartphone or tablet so paper schedules, work orders, and parts requests can finally be a thing of the past.
The funny thing about bus shelters, light rail stations, or signals is they can’t just pop into the main garage at the depot for repairs; technicians have to go out to repair these assets in the field. EAM Mobile puts all the details about a work order in a technician’s hand. A ruggedized phone or tablet can be with them in the field to know what the repair is, what’s been done before, and document what they are fixing. With the smartphone’s camera a technician can scan QR or barcodes to get part information or double check they are at the right asset.
Even in the garage, it’s handy to have information and specs on a bus or system while you’re making complicated repairs. EAM Mobile goes wherever the work is without paper and without sacrificing the information needed to get the job done.
Transit systems are complex and when you’re doing an inspection there could be dozens or hundreds of things to check and confirm. Paper-based checklist binders are heavy, get out of date, and tend to get pretty beat up in the field or the shop. You can put all your checklists into EAM and help ensure everything is done and done to spec. Because the checklists are in EAM, when you update a checklist, it’s automatically pushed to everyone. No more printing new pages to swap in and out of binders. No more outdated checklists floating around.
Checklists are crucial to safety and compliance. EAM Mobile makes it easier for everyone to be sure the work they’ve done is correct and maintains the highest level of safety possible.
EAM Mobile doesn’t just help people order parts and create pick lists for the parts department, it is fully integrated into your parts and inventory system. It helps track stock, check inventory levels, and keeps technicians and the parts department in sync.
More than just eliminating paper, EAM Mobile puts your parts inventory in your pocket. Requests from the field or garage are pushed immediately to materials management and if there are issues, you can respond quickly if parts are low or out of stock.
What if technicians could leave their home in their work truck knowing exactly what they needed to work on without going into the maintenance depot? Imagine how much time that would save and how much faster work could get done that way. Even if someone has to go into the depot for tools, parts, or equipment, knowing what jobs are on the docket via EAM Mobile saves time and effort compared to flipping through paperwork orders.
A technician can plan their whole day around all the work scheduled and if something changes in the middle of the day, they don’t have to return to the depot to get the work order. New, amended, or urgent work orders appear right on their phone or tablet for them to see. If a crew needs to be somewhere else a simple alert can let them know their schedule has changed and where they have to go next.
Speaking of “where”, smartphones and tablets have one very important tool that paper can’t beat: GPS. On EAM Mobile technicians know exactly where they are going and can map how best to get there. Once on site, they can confirm their location on the map and against asset tags. No matter how many times you double-tap that address on a piece of paper, it’s never going to bring up a map where the bus shelter is.
From the schedule to GPS maps, EAM mobile let’s technicians know where and when they should be throughout the day.
Good communication is essential to running a good shop. Everything added into the system via EAM Mobile is immediately pushed throughout the system. Everyone from technicians to supervisors to operations can stay in sync and know what’s going on where and when. If emergency repairs need to be made, those workorders can get to the field in a click and the right teams notified with the new assignment.
Communication and information keep things on track, and everyone focused on the most important jobs at the moment.
You can’t always be online. Sometimes works needs to be done in places where reception isn’t great, but this doesn’t mean you can’t use EAM Mobile. EAM Mobile stores workorders, checklists, and communications locally on the device, so if you are offline, like in a tunnel, you still have all the information you need on hand. EAM Mobile will store all the notes, entries, and updates while offline until you can connect again. Once re-connected to the internet, EAM Mobile syncs updates back and forth without losing data.
From accurate time on site, work completed, and photos documenting damage, EAM Mobile is your secret weapon to gather job data on site. EAM Mobile makes it simple to update work orders with all the important details of the job, so you know the state of repair across your agency.
EAM Mobile gathers asset data from scannable codes without technicians needing to read and copy them down. Photos taken in the field can help future crews make repairs faster if they can see what, and why, was done before.
When technicians have to record everything on paper and then re-enter the data in the office or depot later, important things will be missed. Details of time spent or what/how things were repaired get lost. It’s a fact of life when you rely on paper—you just won’t get the best data, something will always be missing.
Best of all, EAM Mobile uses off-the-shelf devices. These devices can be managed through standard device management solutions so EAM Mobile can be deployed, and updated, remotely.
EAM Mobile is simple to learn and use. If technicians have used technician portal on a desktop or laptop, they are all set to make the switch to mobile.
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Paratransit
