Best Practices in Service Information
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
Manufacturing Business Technology recently announced its MBT 2008 Innovation Insight Awards, and among them was an Honorable Mention for Advanced Technology Services (ATS), a company that provides maintenance and repair services for manufacturing plants.
ATS received the kudos because they deployed Knowledgebase—their own proprietary database of processes, procedures and best practices for their field service technicians. What is interesting is that much of the content in this custom application came from the technicians themselves. Knowledgebase helps ATS to fix equipment faster, thereby reducing their customers’ downtime.
Here at Enigma we agree wholeheartedly with capturing and reusing technical expertise, which is why our products such as InService MRO, InService EPC and the Enigma 3C Platform all include a feature called eNotes. (For a mini product demo of this feature, see our August 15 podcast post.)
While service manuals may contain some previously established best practices or proprietary techniques, eNotes allow mechanics to insert new comments connected to the original content. This lets companies capture feedback on-the-fly and also gives context to the comments because they are linked to the specific task that was being performed. eNotes are also available to other users (based on authorization/distribution rules). This makes it easy for other mechanics to learn from their peers and for OEMs to update documentation so that it reflects real world experience.
But it’s not just eNotes that make Enigma products useful; our products aggregate and deliver all product content in one place, in ways that streamline the entire maintenance execution process. The ability for service technicians to use a single application to pull relevant OEM information, whether parts information or service manuals, from multiple sources, is a tremendous advantage in the field or the service depot. The description of ATS’ Knowledgebase is impressive, but it sounds like an expensive solution. What is more impressive is that, today, any company can provide similar capabilities using Enigma’s out-of-the-box solutions.
