ORTEC Services is part of the multi-entity, multiservice and multi-country ORTEC group (head office in Aix-en-Provence, 12,500 employees in 24 countries, 187 sites in France and 62 abroad, with a turnover of €1.2 billion). Since its LMBO buyout by its employees in 1992, the group has considerably developed its activities through external growth. The Services entity, based at head office, provides customer support ranging from design studies and contracting to industrial cleaning and waste collection for multinationals (Total, EDF, Airbus, etc.) in a variety of sectors including energy, nuclear, oil & gas, agri-food, mining and aeronautics. Gabriel Guillen, group CMMS manager at ORTEC Services, recognizes the benefits of DimoMaint MX, a solution that brings rigour and saves time, particularly in the context of the Org’Agence project, which aims to harmonize good maintenance practices within the group.
Maintenance organization specific to each branch
DimoMaint MX was selected following a six-month POC, when Gabriel Guillen had just joined ORTEC Services’ equipment fleet. His first task was to roll out, improve and maintain the CMMS at the Group’s agencies. Today, around 35 are on DimoMaint MX, mainly in France and Africa (Congo, Gabon and Ghana).
The equipment includes numerous HGVs, group-specific equipment, metalworking equipment, trailers and cranes, particularly for the oil industry. The Equipment department, which owns the machinery, makes it available to the agencies and also provides advice on purchasing and maintenance.
This particular equipment requires annual maintenance, which is the agencies’ responsibility, explains Mr Guillen.
We help the entities with their organisation, but the agency manager remains in charge, because each agency has its own maintenance and operating organisation.”
Harmonising maintenance practices is a key aspect of the ‘Org’Agence’ project
Maintenance is carried out by an equipment manager, who may subcontract all or part of the work. Some agencies have a workshop manager and mechanics to maintain the equipment. It’s up to the agency to decide whether or not to bring maintenance in-house.
We have an advisory role and help with sizing. For example, vehicles less than 15 years old should be serviced through outsourcing to dealerships. Those aged over 15 are managed in-house. In general, wheeled vehicles are broken down into two parts: the carrier – the vehicle itself – and the equipment,” explains Guillen.
The Org’Agence project developed at head office provides a framework for harmonizing best practices, and maintenance is one of them. Some maintenance standards come from agencies that had developed their program very well and knew how to maintain the equipment properly.
The introduction of CMMS has not always been plain sailing
The choice of the current CMMS is the result of several unsuccessful attempts using commercial solutions or tools developed in-house. Managing various types of equipment as well as waste treatment plants on the same tool seemed problematic. A call for tender established a number of objectives to be met:
- Carry out 100% of maintenance operations,
- Monitor maintenance schedules for rolling stock and non-rolling stock,
- A simple, ergonomic solution,
- Integration with the Information System.
According to Guillen, “DimoMaint ticked all the boxes, especially as some of the users were not computer experts. The choice was made by a project group comprising someone from the equipment department, the ISD and maintenance managers from various agencies. The group realised that various CMMS tools coexisted (Excel files, paper, etc.), so there was a desire to harmonise practices.”
Data input: the essential upstream stage
The tool was tested at several agencies in France (Fos/Mer, Rouen and St-Quentin) and in Congo, with different equipment.
Data input means identifying how the parameters will be set,” explains Mr Guillen. “An analysis is carried out agency by agency, rather than as a whole, because each agency has its own specific characteristics : some have an equipment manager. Sometimes it’s the operations department that manages maintenance. Sometimes all or part of the maintenance is subcontracted.
The aim is to understand who is involved in maintenance within the agency, in particular how monitoring is organised, where requests for repairs and preventive maintenance come from, who receives them, who deals with them, who makes the appointments, who checks and closes them, and how maintenance and associated expenditure is managed analytically. The aim is for this audit to identify exactly how the agency operates, so that the various processes can be integrated into the CMMS to answer the following questions: who will receive the regulatory preventive work orders (WOs)? Who will put in the requests for repairs? Who will close the WOs? Will expenses be entered into the CMMS? In the ERP? Does one need to interface? The schedule is also taken into account, because it’s a question of clearly identifying the users.”
The aim is to understand who is involved in maintenance within the agency, in particular how monitoring is organised, where requests for repairs and preventive maintenance come from, who receives them, who deals with them, who makes the appointments, who checks and closes them, and how maintenance and associated expenditure is managed analytically. The aim is for this audit to identify exactly how the agency operates, so that the various processes can be integrated into the CMMS to answer the following questions: who will receive the regulatory The crucial configuration phase
The ERP contains the Equipment database, which is exported. Mr Guillen knows which equipment needs to be tracked in the CMMS according to its specific characteristics – generally large items of equipment for which all the checks are created.
Each category of equipment must undergo legal checks such as a technical inspection, regulatory checks following accidents and finally maintenance checks. Everything is defined in the Org’Agence. Parameters need to be set for each vehicle and each asset before installation in the agency. This process, which used to take 3 months for a small agency, has been reduced to one or two weeks,” says Mr Guillen.
The Equipment database is structured by asset category with its attributes (Atex, ADR carriage of dangerous goods authorisation) and the size of the vehicle (light vehicle, heavy goods vehicle, autonomous or not, etc.). Using a macro, Mr Guillen automatically creates the PW (preventive work) import file so that he knows which check will be assigned to which asset. He initializes the dates using the checks already present in the ERP, which creates a ready-made list of equipment.
Automation and ERP/CMMS interfacing
Mr Guillen creates the assets and preventive work.
Incoming and outgoing equipment means that we have to create new preventive work and check that nothing has been forgotten when a vehicle is sold when it leaves the fleet. So we have automated the processes.
The equipment database automatically updates the CMMS, which is why an interface was originally needed. We create equipment that we move during inter-agency transfers. Sometimes the agencies are different companies. This means that a sale has to be made between two companies, and the interface takes this into account.
In addition to this, we also track suppliers and parts. Regulatory checks that are closed in the CMMS are updated in the ERP system. Not all the agencies have them, depending on the nature of their business. The aim is to have everything ready when we go to the agency to run the training courses and fine-tune any omissions. Generally, work requests are made on the move, as drivers are equipped with smartphones and can issue work requests by logging on to the database.”
In addition to this, we also track suppliers and parts. Regulatory checks that are closed in the CMMS are updated in the ERP system. Not all the agencies have them, depending on the nature of their business. The aim is to have everything ready when we go to the agency to run the training courses and fine-tune any omissions. Generally, work requests are made on the move, as drivers are equipped with smartphones and can issue work requests by logging on to the database.”The connector between the CMMS and ERP includes:
Regulatory contracts: these are monitored in the ERP for all the agencies. Those equipped with the CMMS, which enter regulatory vehicle contracts into the ERP system, enable information to be shared across the group.
- Synchronizing the equipment repository
- Purchasing: you can place orders in the ERP, then link a work order to an order in the ERP. In this way, we can see open orders in the ERP, i.e. those that have not been closed in the CMMS. You can select a work order, and when the order is received, the expense is transferred to a ‘Supplier resources’ line in the selected WO.
In addition, the CMMS WOs can be used in vehicle planning tools.
The necessary acculturation to maintenance
A CMMS is not a tool dedicated solely to maintenance: it is useful to the whole agency, particularly operations, which can use it to report faults or carry out repairs. Mr Guillen has rolled out more than thirty agencies since his arrival in 2018:
Audits sometimes reveal certain processes that have not been formalised. The CMMS is therefore crucial at this level. The more deployments there are, the more support is needed to register new equipment. We make sure that only one person is responsible for the equipment per branch, and that the regulatory checks have the same descriptions, the same standards, and that all the assets are created in the same way. This provides a sound basis that is refined in relation to the descriptions present in the ERP.”
The major benefits of the CMMS: rigor, time savings and safety
The CMMS does not miraculously boost performance: apart from the initial fine-tuning of parameters, everything depends on the staff and organization in place. Implementing a CMMS can feel like an additional burden. We therefore need to motivate staff by demonstrating its benefits, such as being able to carry out and record 100% of preventive maintenance operations and grouping work to avoid production errors.
The management of internal regulations following accidents enables us to highlight the assets on which a lack of control can affect people’s safety.
For the mechanics who do the clocking in and out, we’re highlighting the increased rigour they’ll benefit from, and therefore the time they’ll save in their day-to-day work.
DimoMaint MX is much more than just a workshop planning tool!
Issuing work orders, formalizing work requests, keeping records, archiving maintenance, analyzing costs… the benefits are numerous because the solution centralizes the database and makes it reliable. Being able to track a work request via a smartphone is a real bonus!
Two types of maintenance indicator
Two categories of indicator were defined early on in the project using Power BI:
- Operating indicators to check that the agency is using the CMMS tool properly and that checks are being carried out, entered and closed correctly, with the correct clocking.
- Maintenance indicators: these depend on the quality of the operating indicators. It is therefore essential that the valuation of parts on the work order is rigorous to have reliable cost indicators.
We need to define machine downtime in the solution so that we can eventually analyse the MTTR, MTBF and so on. We’re in the process of interconnecting all our vehicles so that we can get time feedback. We’ll then be able to calculate the MTBF because we’ll have the number of hours per vehicle with the number of jobs and the average operating time,” says Mr Guillen.
An empty CMMS is useless!
As Mr Guillen explains, it’s important to understand the costs associated with the work:
We know how to analyse expenditure on equipment. In the ERP, we know the amount for preventive, curative, breakage and regulatory maintenance… but we didn’t know how to explain it. Work orders are associated with orders. We interfaced the orders with the ERP so that we could feed the costs back into DimoMaint. The workshop operates like an external garage with a resale cost. Costs from DimoMaint are exported to PowerBI. We can explain to agency managers the cost of their annual month-to-month maintenance, with a breakdown of the most expensive assets and the cost of labour, the work orders concerned and the breakdown between labour and subcontracting costs. This shows the cost of the most expensive components on a crane.
Sound advice for an organization without a CMMS
For Mr Guillen, it’s important not to overlook the roll-out time:
It’s not a piecemeal operation that the technician does in their spare time. You need to take into account the time required to set up the tool beforehand. In addition, feeding the database into the tool is important: you have to enter suppliers, users and parts, and keep it alive and organised. You have to spare neither your time nor your resources, because it’s easy to get bogged down in checks and WOs.”
