Asset management is often at the core of many businesses, especially across industries such as manufacturing, Oil-&-Gas, Utilities, Logistics & Transportation, etc. These industries rely on effective uptime and operational efficiency of their assets that contribute directly to the productivity of their employees. Managing these assets to perform at their optimal level has a direct impact on the bottom line of these companies.
Applying mobile technologies to Enterprise Asset Management delivers a ton of benefits such as:
- Increased asset availability and efficiency.
- Reduced unplanned outages with preventive maintenances.
- Improved Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).
- Reduced time-to-repair and downtime.
- Reduction in annual maintenance cost.
- Improved personnel safety.
- Increased productivity of field personnel.
- Ability to leverage all core IT applications in the company.
However mobilizing Enterprise Asset Management has been an expensive and time-consuming effort until now. This is primarily because Enterprise Asset Management Mobile apps are mission critical to business operations and cannot rely on external factors such as network connectivity, availability of back-end applications, etc. As a result Enterprise Asset Management Mobile apps need to work effectively and for long periods of time in an Offline mode. This entails not only building all the offline capabilities for the app like data synchronization and orchestration, Offline authentication, Conflict resolution etc., but it also needs complex business logic to be incorporated into the app to be able to function effectively for long periods of time, without any connectivity.
Points to consider while building an offline mobile app
Building an offline mobile app with such complexity has typically required a lot of development effort with developers needing to write complex programs, which also becomes very difficult to maintain and enhance. An Mobile Enterprise Asset Management apps needs to:
- Have offline capability to operate for long hours without network connectivity and without providing any constraints to the field personnel.
- Ability to execute complex business rules with good data synchronization and orchestration capabilities to sync core backend applications appropriately.
- Provide an intuitive user interface that can simplify existing business processes and increase productivity of the users.
- Flexible architecture to incorporate enhancements very quickly and roll out to business users.
- Scalable not only in terms of infrastructure but also in terms of capabilities such that incremental enhancements which can be added to the apps very easily at any time.
- Durable devices that can withstand the pressures of a rugged environment.
Fortunately technology has come a long way and made this easier to implement. New technologies such as model-driven architectures with codeless development platforms enable you to reinvent your business processes for Enterprise Asset Management and build complex offline apps in a fraction of the time and cost as compared to traditional development methods.
Some of the most deployed offline mobile apps in the field of Enterprise Asset Management (EAM):
- Works manager: A mobile app to manage work orders for manufacturing or maintenance operations. It allows personnel to safely install, maintain, inspect and repair assets in the field thereby improving the efficiency of such operations.
- Inventory Manager: Mobile app that performs cycle counting, availability checks, material movements, goods transfer/issue/receipt for increased productivity, lowering operational cost and optimizing supply chain operations.
- Rounds Manager: Mobile app to efficiently monitor & record readings in the field, condition monitoring and field measurements.
- Safety tracker: Mobile app to record safety issues and enabling quick and better response maximizing workforce safety.
The appsFreedom Platform is one such Model-driven, Codeless Platform that enables you to build and deploy such mission critical offline mobile apps, without any coding required. It makes building and deploying Mobile Enterprise Asset Management apps a breeze with all the flexibility, scalability and capability one would expect of mission critical apps.