For RER’s October issue on technology, we interviewed more than a dozen software manufacturers, including Don Whitbeck, CEO of Guelph, Ontario-based Texada Software Inc. Here are Whitbeck’s extended comments and insights.
RER: How does your software facilitate shop management? Please share some concrete examples.
Whitbeck: Our vision is to have software that has components aimed at all levels of employees. A dashboard will provide the ability to show how well the shop is doing, what the back logs look like, how each worker in the shop is doing compared to previous performance and how much of each type of equipment is in each stage of the shop.
Supervisors have the ability to see the current jobs and the new jobs scheduled for the day. They have the ability to assign jobs, see which jobs are late, and move jobs around among the employees. They can also see if items in the shop are due to go out and what the deadline for repair is. Our software provides them with the ability to manage their part of the shop and to ensure their workers are busy and on time.
Individual employees can see the jobs that they have scheduled, what they are working on, and when they are late on a job. The software allows them to easily enter items used for the repair and automatically tallies the expense of the repair against the resource itself.
Also we have desired our system to allow the shop to define its own set of resource states. This allows our software to model the workflow of a shop as it exists. Items can be moved between states until the work is finished and this allows the rest of the company to be able to track the progress of an item through the shop until it is ready to go back out into the field.
How does your software facilitate the scheduling of maintenance according to manufacturer-recommended intervals?
You can automatically schedule maintenance in a wide variety of ways using our software:
- On return from rental
- On a given date
- After a given amount of cumulative time on rental
- After a given amount of cumulative meter usage
- On a given cumulative reading of the meter
You can also manually schedule maintenance at any time.
Can the software notify the rental company in some way when a machine is due for maintenance?
When a machine is due for maintenance, it is added to the list of open work orders. An e-mail gets sent to a designated list of people when some assigns the work order to a specific person, that person gets an email that a new work order has been assigned to them and the details are in the message.
Does your software play a role in training of service technicians?
Yes, you can attach instructions and other documents to work orders. These instructions can be step-by-step instructions on what to do to assign new learning technicians.
What role does your software play in the organization of warranty information?
Our software allows you to track when the warranty of a resource is due to expire, it also allows you to keep a electronic copy of the warranty attached to the resource itself. This makes it easy to look up the warranty at any time.
How does your software facilitate keeping track of service history on an individual machine?
Our software records and saves all of the work orders generated for a given machine. It will track which of the work orders were completed and which were not. It will track the full history of who did each repair and what equipment was used for the repair.
Does your software facilitate parts organization? What about the buying or selling of parts online?
Our software allows the shop and the company to organize parts in a tree structure. This allows groups like of parts into branches of the tree. Once a part is in the resource tree it can be added to a work order as a part designated for the repair. The part can also be sold to customers as part of a repair to their own equipment or simply as a part that they want to buy. When inventory levels are low our software will automatically alert the purchasing department of the need to buy additional stock and our software will provide the purchasing department with an estimate of how any to buy based on preset levels.
How does your software facilitate the organization of the shop in regard to prioritizing jobs or separating rental fleet repair from the repair of customer-owned equipment?
We have a priority field for work orders where the priority can be set. This tells the people working on items in which order to work on the assigned items. Also visible is the date and time that the item is needed. This visibility makes it clear to everyone included the actual person doing the work when the item is needed. We use color-coding of work orders to indicate which work orders are for internal and which ones are for external jobs.
How does your software facilitate cost management and cost analysis, the management of cost and income in the shop itself?
We have a maintenance quote system to help generate quotes for repairs on externally owned equipment. We track the costs of all repairs including parts and service by each item. This means that you can pull up the complete history of repairs and their costs of each individual resource. With that information you can determine which items are costing you money due to the number of repairs required and which ones are making you money.
Can a field service technician access information using a wireless device (Blackberry), laptop or other means?
Our maintenance subsection has a web services API surrounding all of its functionality. This allows us to provide interfaces to all kinds of different devices including: blackberry, laptop, tablets, etc.
Does your software provide the technician with a checklist of items to be performed at various intervals or items to check before a returned piece of equipment can go to the "ready" line?
Yes each job on a work order can have a checklist associated with it these checklists are completely flexible and give the technician through the process of making the item ready to go.
Do you find that your rental company customers are increasingly interested in using software to help organize their shop and service capability?
We find that this is a key area for our customers. Our customers are telling us that having an efficient and flexible shop is a key area where they know they can improve their bottom line. The want to know what the backlog is, which items are costing them too much in repairs, and they want a system that helps the technicians complete their work in a timely fashion. We are designing additional improvements to continue to move in the right direction in these areas.
Do you partner with telematics providers to facilitate services such as diagnostics of equipment, tracking of physical location of equipment or other telematics services?
Yes we are building our product specifically with these kinds of partnerships in mind. We have built in APIs that allow us to connect (either loosely or strongly) to those systems that our customers want to use. We realize that we are not the only software that our customers need to run and we are providing a way for our customer so be able to pick and choose best of breed solutions to integrate with our system.
Does your system automatically update inventory availability after shop uses system to report on completion of service tasks?
Yes, and in fact if you wish it will schedule rentals based on projected availability of items moving through the shop. For example, if an item is in the washing bay and that typically takes 30 minutes to complete that service, then the system will show availability in 30 minutes. When something is complete and set to ready then the system automatically accounts for that transition.
How will this area (the facilitating of shop organization) evolve in the coming years, in your company's software and in the industry as a whole?
We will build connectors that connect us to third party systems as demanded by our customers. We think there is room in the industry for some electronic protocols that allow suppliers' systems to automatically interact with consumers' systems. In order for this to be viable there needs to be some standardization across the industry (so that we are not implementing one offs for each supplier). We then think that with a standard we can provide a system that tightly couples the suppliers of parts and equipment with the shop itself. This would greatly simplify:
- Warranty interactions
- Parts ordering
- Specification retrieval
- Recall and notice communications
Any other capabilities you'd like to mention or additional thoughts about the contributions of software to service and shop capabilities?
Our software also can act as a time clock for the technician. They can tell the system when they are starting a repair and when they are finished. We can use that to automatically calculate the cost for their time based on the specified hourly rate (for jobs on outside equipment).
