Millions of people everyday use iPads and mobile phones to shop, book holidays, order takeaway food, taxis and more. People in their twenties have never known any other way of doing things. For them, using mobile devices is as natural and normal as breathing.

Potential new hires for maintenance and service jobs expect to be using mobiles for managing work orders and accessing stock information. If companies aren’t yet set up for mobile working, this can make it difficult to attract new talent.

At 2BM, we specialise in creating products built on SAP technology and have been a United VARs member for over two years. One of our suite of products, 2BM Mobile Work Order, makes it easier to introduce tomorrow’s solutions and technologies into today’s workforce. It digitises manual and paper-based processes to free maintenance and service technicians from complicated and outdated user interfaces in their daily work with SAP PM & CS. 

Read more: 3 Keys to Choosing the Best Provider for your Mobility Project

We were contacted by the maintenance manager of a sugar production company who was keen to modernise the way they worked. But not just for the efficiencies they could gain. He told us:

“I don’t care so much about the tech stuff. Our main problem is we’re having trouble attracting people out of college university. They’re used to working with iPads and modern tools on their engineering courses and then they come here and see us all running around to check stock and using pen and paper for a lot of our processes. It just puts them off.

Our workforce is getting older and we need to attract younger talent. They need insights and the tech to support. They’re ambitious and don’t want to waste time working for a company with archaic tools and methods.”

Real-time insights

Younger millennial engineers want to work for companies who are using contemporary technology such as the Internet of Things (IOT), automation, machine learning and real-time analytics. Industry 4.0 is their reality, their normal. They are trained to use data in their analysis, and so they expect to have real-time insights into performance. Live insights can help answer questions such as:

• Where are we wasting money?
• Are we replacing equipment too soon?
• How do we make sure we aren’t over-maintaining?
• What spare parts do we currently have in stock?
• Are we meeting safety regulation standards?
• How are we performing against KPIs such as planned maintenance percentage, MTBF and MTTR, OEE Equipment Efficiency and wrench time?

2BM Mobile Work Order provides the essential features that new recruits will expect. For many service and maintenance departments, it is the perfect first step in their digital transformation journey.

It enables engineers to easily create and manage maintenance activities from their mobile devices and provides a graphical view on KPIs, which can also be customised to their specific needs. 2BM Mobile Work Order runs on both SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA and is certified by SAP. It allows maintenance professionals to:

• Execute work orders: by having real-time information at their fingertips they can view details, confirm operations, take measurements, issue materials, register time spent and manage attachments.
• Create notifications: allows them to capture all the details about a critical situation, and add items, causes, codes, activities, tasks and document the situation with photos which they can annotate or even draw on using their fingers.
• Inspect infrastructure: browse functional locations and equipment. See notifications, pending and historic orders and measuring points. View technical documentation and safety instructions.