It’s broken, call maintenance: A work request process that’s more than just tickets

At Fiix we believe that your work request process should not only enable anyone in your organization to communicate issues to the maintenance team clearly and with ease, it should act as a catalyst for other departments to support the maintenance function.

That’s why we’ve specifically designed the Fiix work request portal to enable anyone within your organization to participate in maintenance in two key ways – without needing a login:

• Enhanced visibility. By giving guests enhanced visibility to all work requests and allowing them to search and track work requests, they have an increased sense of ownership in the process, assisting you in achieving a total productive maintenance (TPM) culture.
• Providing additional context. Through customization of the request form, guests can provide additional context based on their area of expertise. This will move you closer towards a reliability-centered maintenance reality by prompting guests to pause and think about why a defect or failure occurred when submitting a work request.

When other roles are encouraged to work in conjunction with the maintenance team through your work request portal, there are productivity gains for the maintenance team as well, including:

• Fewer status updates. When guest users are able to search, sort, and track their own and other peoples’ requests, it means less time spent responding to status updates from other departments.
• Fewer submitted requests. When guest users can see other submitted work requests, they avoid creating duplicate tickets and can select multiple assets on the same work request.
• Increased clarity of requests. The maintenance team can customize the fields on your work request form and set mandatory fields to ensure you have the critical information you need without a lot of back and forth.

For information on configuring and launching your work request portal, please visit the help center. Or keep reading to learn how this simple update to your work request process can enable TPM and play a critical role in FMEA.

Enhanced visibility enabling everyone to keep maintenance at the forefront

This philosophy, that everyone in your facility should contribute to maintenance, is called total productive maintenance or TPM. This approach is proven to lead to fewer breakdowns, a safer workplace, and better overall performance.

So, if the concept is so widely accepted, why are more facilities not practicing TPM? There are two big barriers that many organizations struggle with when it comes to TPM:

1. Most organizations struggle with cross-functional empathy and the communication that is required to achieve a TPM culture.
2. Different departments working in silos means critical information gets lost at shift change.

This is where you can take advantage of the work request portal to encourage everyone to have a shared responsibility for maintenance.

For example, equipment operators know exactly how their equipment ticks, so they are often in the best position to identify leading-edge issues before they become failures. The Fiix work request portal makes it easy for operators to submit a work request, track the status of their request, and view all other submitted work requests without requiring a CMMS login.

Autonomous maintenance in conjunction with the work request portal can facilitate cross-functional communication that actually leads to improved productivity, safer work environments, and fewer stoppages or breakdowns.

Capturing failure codes on your way towards reliability-centered maintenance

Your work request process can also play a critical role in your broader failure modes effects analysis (FMEA) process. The work request portal allows you to design and customize how you want stakeholders to be involved in the capturing and analysis of failure modes. This information can optimize your preventative maintenance methods by adjusting intervals or tasks, eliminating unnecessary PMs, or adding new ones.

A failure code is a shorthand that can be cross-referenced to better understand why an asset failed during production. The benefits of adding a failure code field to your work request form are two-fold.

• Immediate benefit: In order to assign a failure code, we must pause and think about why a defect or failure occurred before jumping right to fixing the issue and missing out on this critical opportunity for improvement.
• Future benefit: Your CMMS will hold valuable data that can unlock identification and prioritization of failures modes to move you closer towards a reliability-centered maintenance strategy.

Improved understanding and transparency of failure modes across the organization can lead to better work practices, training opportunities, and expedited troubleshooting.

Summary

Through your CMMS there is an opportunity for your work request process to be more than just a ticket system. The Fiix work request portal can assist you in getting to your best maintenance strategy by enabling a TPM culture and playing a critical role in your FMEA process.