What’s the point of making maintenance harder?

By eliminating common service delays, the offering helps equipment manufacturers streamline their documentation process.

When a piece of equipment breaks down, it can cause disruptions in production and hamper regular operations. Furthermore, the complexity of the equipment in use today makes the problem even worse. As a result, getting equipment back online can be expensive quickly, and the last thing any manufacturer wants is to pay for “wasted time” while a technician finds the information needed to complete the repair.

Sadly, it’s a common scenario. The majority of today’s machines are custom or extremely complex. And they often come with extensive documentation to aid the field technician. The process of finding the manual and the extensive supporting documentation can easily take 15 to 45 minutes.

Consider Simmons Machine Tool

Consider Simmons Machine Tool in Albany, New York. Simmons makes custom railroad machines. There are between 5000-20,000 pages of manuals in these enormous, custom-built machines. As a technician is servicing a machine in a facility. It is difficult to be sure that all the technical service bulletins have been addressed or that the advice is included with the manual.

Since the value chain of information rarely follows a machine when it changes hands, this issue can quickly compound. Because of this, when the manufacturer of the machine emails out service bulletins and the company no longer owns the machine. The update is of no use. They won’t stop what they’re doing to look up who they sold it to just so they can forward the message.

Machine Document

Machine Document, a product offered by QTH 54, addresses these issues by providing technicians with easy access to information they need, including real-time service bulletins. Techs simply scan the QR code on the machine, and the code links directly to machine-specific information on QTH 54’s secure cloud-based system – information that manufacturers can also password protect. Since the QR code does not go to a URL, you won’t have to worry about maintaining your webpage. It’s essentially a key that allows a technician to engage the system.

Documentation can be provided by machine manufacturers in any format. In addition, you can provide step-by-step instructions on how to install, clean, or otherwise service. A specific piece of equipment with PDFs, e-books, manuals, or videos. 

People can comprehend many complex processes much more quickly when they can watch them in action. Rather than trying to readjust text on a page. A technician can easily use in-house additive machinery to create parts that are not otherwise available by adding 3D print files to the dataset.

A few other planned enhancements include the ability to order parts directly from the online manual to streamline the repair process and eliminate a few steps. Also, equipment manufacturers can create documentation that follows a machine during the entire manufacturing process. By adding this functionality, manufacturers would never have to face the consequences of missing documentation.

Optimizing integrated facilities is a “REvolution”

Scanning a QR code or asset tag on a machine will tell you everything you need to know about it. Identify and fix issues without touching the machine using analytics-driven work orders. As a remote control, you can view and modify points on any machine, regardless of the equipment’s brand or underlying BMS. The following are examples of what can be accomplished with a few taps on Ezenics Mobile, a cloud-based, software-agnostic mobile application designed for service technicians to access enterprise-level facility optimization systems on the go on the go.

Realcomm Intelligent Buildings

The Realcomm Intelligent Buildings Conference (http://www.ib-con.com/) featured. Large touchscreen kiosks designed to look like giant mobile phones throughout the convention center’s halls and gathering areas. The interactive displays allowed facility managers, technicians, and members of the intelligent buildings community to experience. The live Ezenics Mobile application in a big way. To pull up the application on their mobile devices as easily as they could on the conference cards.

Demonstrations were conducted by Ezenics and integration partners from Microsoft, CBRE, Cylon, and 360 Facility. As conference-goers were eager to use the application, most of the conversation revolved around the displays. The ability to integrate enterprise-level analytics with most work order management and control systems has many benefits, including delivering the power of analytics to every field technician. We will also provide them with prescribed solutions to common issues, downloadable manuals, detailed asset information, floorplans, GPS location detection, and demand response live event notifications.

Using the Ezenics Mobile integrated solution, technicians can locate, examine, and service machines more efficiently; respond to phone calls; and complete work orders in a fraction of the time. It would require using more traditional methods, such as giving them all of the information and tools they need in one interface regardless of which and how many different systems their organization uses. The increased productivity of facility and service managers. Which leads to significant savings and client satisfaction.

Demonstration of a sample document

To illustrate how the solution is used and implemented, a few example scenarios were presented at the conference. In one scenario, a newly hired service technician and an uncomfortably cold office worker were involved.

“Sue” is a Microsoft Smart Campus employee and “Matt” is a brand-new CBRE service technician. 360 Facility provided the integrated work order management system, and Cylon provided the FDD-ready controllers. Which enabled rapid, low-cost, “plug-and-play” integration with Ezenics’ AFDDITM.

After arriving very early to prepare a meeting room, Sue notices that it’s uncomfortably cold. When the secretary calls CBRE’s facility management call center, they raise the temperature from 74°F to 80°F. Sue is still cold half an hour later, and her meeting is about to begin. So she alerts her secretary once more.

CBRE dispatches

The CBRE dispatches Matt to the building with a smartphone in hand to resolve the issue before the meeting. When Matt arrives at the location, the GPS-enabled location detection feature displays a street view of the building. Along with additional downloadable content such as floorplans and engineering documents.

Matt is notified via 360 Facility’s integrated work order system of an open work order for the building and taps “Maintenance” to access the details. Immediately, he can find out which machine the work order is for (VAV-01), who the reporter is. The call-back number, the description of the situation, and an image of where the machine is located in the building.

Even though he is a newly hired field technician who has never been to the building. He already understands the situation, including the location of the machine that is causing Sue’s meeting room to be too cold.