The cement producer ensures rigorous monitoring of its regulatory inspections at its head office
The head office (650 employees) of the VICAT Group (10,000 employees worldwide, €4 billion in revenue), a cement producer present in 12 countries – from Brazil to India – is located in L’Isle-d’Abeau (38). It is spread across two buildings housing all support functions, nationally and internationally. While cement is the group’s core business, it also produces concrete, aggregates and finishing products among others. The scope of Patrick Pipitone, head of general services, covers the head office and includes many activities such as managing major projects, renovations, equipment installation and overseeing external contractors with a two-person team. Faced with the need to cover the monitoring of mandatory regulatory checks (electrical, fire extinguishers…) regular or occasional, he convinced his management to implement a CMMS for buildings dedicated.
Recurring but essential tasks
Around fifty annual electrical inspections are carried out by an organisation that often recommends repairs. The Excel/Outlook combination was hardly intuitive for ensuring rigorous follow-up, especially since deadlines vary: 15 days, quarterly, semi-annual or annual. Patrick Pipitone needed visibility on electrical panels, boiler rooms, chillers, air conditioning units, automatic doors, elevators, etc. So many elements used by everyone and often overlooked. Faced with this multitude of tasks, he decided to carry out an inventory of assets: “The challenge is both technical and strategic, because it is about keeping traceability of operations, tracking contracts, and ensuring there are no misses or oversights. The volume and recurrence led me to look for an IT tool to help in this approach within a controlled budget envelope, and according to prerequisites defined by an IT department requiring a SS0 and the cloud/SaaS mode.”
Une GMAO à partir de zéro
After consulting several providers, Patrick Pipitone fully aligned with the philosophy of DimoMaint FM, because the solution allows easy optimization of building operations thanks to a rapid deployment. He built a hierarchy (site, building, floor…) from scratch. Until then, a simple Excel file was used to track assets. “We created our structure from scratch and even developed our own coding system for our assets. The ease of implementation was one of the deciding factors. Other solutions were not mature enough regarding the IT department’s requirements, or suffered from an interface that was too complex.”
Extensive upfront preparation and a “Quick Start” deployment
The project started at the beginning of 2024. It took four months of coding before importing data into the system. Patrick Pipitone carried out many tasks alone, while communicating remotely with DimoMaint. “It is not for everyone,” he admits, acknowledging that his background in IT was valuable. “You need to show a certain logic and rely on essential know-how, having the experience in coding, in the structuring of operating procedures and for assets that require maintenance.” You therefore need to think globally, put yourself in the users’ shoes (site manager, maintenance team) and establish rigorous follow-up schedules. Patrick Pipitone therefore defined internal naming rules so these can be passed from one contractor to another, and so that everyone uses the same reference system. The goal: to be able to generate and track interventions without managing a flood of emails.
Rigorous preventive maintenance management using schedules
After coding the 400 assets – the process is ongoing – Patrick Pipitone added an individual photo, the associated technical documentation, the location and the status (in/out of service). Ensuring that the 200 fire extinguishers are correctly located and accessible, setting up schedules for compliance or inspections, notably for generators that must be checked every two weeks. A contractor carries out checks on our eight automatic doors every six months. You have to make sure they don’t miss the deadline. Creating schedules allows for a timetable to be set and prevents having all contractors on site at the same time, which helps distribute the workload. “The idea is to find all information in one place.” Currently, he does not yet use the “Quotes and Orders” function but records repair costs in the tool, which is far more user-friendly than a heavy ERP.
A well-structured process flow
Corrective actions are carried out based on contractors’ interventions. Rather than going through Outlook or the ERP, Patrick Pipitone enters a due date in the solution’s calendar. Previously, he sometimes received decontextualized invoices via the ERP. As a result, he could not be certain that the repair had been completed. In short: the tool gives him a global view of the assets and buildings to maintain, provides traceability of preventive maintenance interventions, and allows tracking of contractors’ actions and associated costs. This results in time savings in follow-up and increased rigour. “We have implemented many tasks that did not exist before. Now I will be able to delegate some tasks to the team.”
Asset status monitoring
Monitoring of mandatory regulatory checks
The CMMS needs to be kept active
According to Patrick Pipitone: “You need to be available before and after the project, via a dedicated contact, because maintenance actions are time-consuming. For example, you must validate the data import. In addition, you must feed the solution to keep it alive so that it remains relevant over time. Now, I can show a schedule of recurring preventive tasks and durations to my management, not to mention the planning for corrective work if needed.”
For now, DimoMaint FM is not yet open to contractors. In the long term, Patrick wants them all to use the CMMS to access interventions directly in the tool in order to share a common view. He does not rule out introducing a connector with the SAP ERP, notably to retrieve purchase orders. There are many projects: “I plan to develop work schedules including, for example, restroom checks, and to do even more preventive work to minimise corrective work and thus strengthen our image with internal clients. We have an internal ticketing tool for work requests. In the long run, I would like to connect all assets, including water fountains and coffee machines that will have QR codes applied to them, so that requests are transmitted directly into DimoMaint FM and, ultimately, end up with the supplier.”
