For a company which deals with extremely complex products such as power engines, turbines, and aircraft, operational inefficiencies are crucial.
Allocating technical and engineering resources and personnel for maintaining or servicing complex energy infrastructures such as turbine engines and large power plants, the customer dispatches technicians worldwide for complicated repairs and machinery examinations, often to remote locations where network connectivity is a logistical challenge.
While the company had a repair work order system in place, it lacked the real-time visibility of their technician’s live activity or service and equipment requirements, leading to inefficient operations. As a trusted Application Systems Integrator, the customer engaged Buchanan to design, extend and implement a new application solution which would provide near real-time visibility into repairs and service visits.
The technicians previously relied on manual reporting of repairs due to a lack of a viable mobile interface and online connectivity. In some cases, manual handwritten notes would later be entered into the system once connectivity was available. This manual process of reporting introduced inefficiencies and errors in the field service life cycle. This lack of visibility and real-time integration results in inefficiencies and inaccuracies in the entire work order life cycle.
Buchanan’s team helped develop and enhance a live tracking mobile application for the repair technicians, which offered real-time access to service technicians, inventories and repair orders. The application is a Node.js based application built on AWS and utilizes DocumentDB for the data store. The application is deployed on tablets, with a web version also available. Service Technicians could take the tablet with them to repair sites and perform live updates to it throughout the repair order life cycle.
To tackle the internet connectivity and visibility issue in remote areas, the mobile application was designed to store and sync the offline updates once the connection was available. Alongside the deployment of Live Outage, our team also performed an in-depth optimization of the applications’ AWS infrastructure in order to reduce the footprint of the application and, hence, the costs.
The mobile application is used by service technicians around the world, handling thousands of work orders and creating an integrated network between the company and its technicians. The app enabled the managers to view the availability of any technician, anytime, from anywhere in the world while benefiting from the reduced runtime in the repair progress reporting.
The legacy application lacked visibility of ongoing repairs, blueprints, repair histories, instructions, inventory receipts, and repair tracking. The new app provided the ability to initiate part replacement orders at the time of service thereby synchronizing inventories. The Buchanan application team reduced their cloud costs by optimizing their AWS infrastructure minimizing the app’s digital footprint on the cloud, and improved application response-times for connected users.
The impact of this real-time visibility through the new mobile application and cost reduction through Application optimization extends beyond just operational efficiency. With more precise data about repair parts and trends, the company’s engineering teams can study repair patterns and identify recurring issues with distinct components and equipment, hence reducing the costs.
