Maintenance
Raise, work and close repair and upkeep jobs on your plant equipment, and schedule the recurring ones.
A maintenance dispatch is one repair or upkeep job on a piece of plant equipment: the transfer pump at a depot stopped priming, the loading rack needs its quarterly check, a cylinder filling scale needs repair. It records what is wrong, who is on it, the time spent and the parts used. Recurring upkeep is set up once as a schedule, and the app raises the dispatches when they come due.
Dispatches are raised against work centers, which is how the app names the equipment you maintain; set them up first under Resources → Work Centers (see the Resources guide). Trucks have their own vehicle records and are not maintained through dispatches.
How to raise a dispatch when something needs repair
- Open Resources → Dispatches and choose to add one (New Maintenance Dispatch).
- Pick the Location and the Work Center.
- Set Priority (Low, Medium, High or Critical) and Source: Reactive for a breakdown, Scheduled for planned upkeep, Non-Conformance when the job comes out of an issue.
- Set Severity, which says who does the work: Preventive, Operator Performed (your own crew handles it), Support Required (it needs help from elsewhere in your company) or OEM Required (the equipment's manufacturer or its service agent must do it).
- Set OEE Impact, how much the job affects the equipment's availability: Down, Planned, Impact or No Impact. (OEE stands for overall equipment effectiveness.)
- Tick Takes work center offline when the equipment cannot be used while the job is open; it stays unavailable until the Planned End Time, or until the dispatch is completed.
- Add Planned Start Time, Planned End Time, a Suspected Failure Mode if you have a guess, and a Description, then Save.
A new dispatch is Open.
How to work a dispatch when you are assigned to it
- Set the Assignee in the dispatch's properties.
- Press Start when work begins; the dispatch moves to In Progress and Actual Start is recorded as that moment.
- Record time with Add Timecard: the Employee, Start Time, End Time and Notes. These times are what the dashboard's repair and failure figures are built from.
- Record parts with Add Spare Part: Scan or Select the item, enter the Quantity and Unit of Measure, and press Add & Issue. The part is issued out of inventory straight away as a maintenance use, so on-hand stock goes down. For example, the valve seals a technician uses on a repair are issued here.
- Leave notes and comments on the dispatch as you go.
- When you know the cause, set the Actual Failure Mode.
How to finish or reopen a dispatch when the work is done
Press Complete. The dispatch moves to Completed and its assignee is cleared; record when the work actually finished in Actual End in its properties. Reopen brings it back if the problem returns. A dispatch that is no longer needed can have its Status set to Cancelled, which also clears the assignee. Delete Dispatch removes it entirely.
A dispatch is always one of Open, Assigned, In Progress, Completed or Cancelled.
How to schedule recurring upkeep when equipment needs regular checks
- Open Resources → Schedules and add one (New Scheduled Maintenance).
- Fill in Schedule Name, Work Center, Location, Frequency (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly or Annual), Priority and Estimated Duration (minutes).
- For a daily schedule, pick the Days of the week it runs, and tick Skip Holidays to skip company holidays.
- Tick Takes Work Center Offline if the equipment is out of use during the job.
- Set the Next Due Date and leave Active ticked. Add the parts the job needs on the schedule.
When a schedule comes due, the app creates an Open dispatch for it, marked Scheduled and Preventive, with OEE Impact Planned and the schedule's parts copied on. It checks every night and also right after you save a schedule. If several occurrences have passed, it creates one dispatch for each, then moves the next due date forward. A new schedule with no next due date gets one a full interval away, so saving a schedule never creates an overdue job by surprise.
How to keep a list of failure causes when you want to compare repairs
Resources → Failure Modes holds the causes you pick from as Suspected Failure Mode and Actual Failure Mode, each with a Failure Mode name and a Type. A consistent list is what lets you compare repairs across equipment and depots.