Efficiency for you: transparency for your organisation

SoftSols has nearly three decades of experience in bringing CMMS solutions to a large variety of manufacturing clients around the globe and our latest software, Agility is recognised as a leading system in the industry for efficient and cost effective maintenance management.

Plant and Equipment, by its very nature, can often be unreliable and prone to breakdowns. This results in costly loss of production plus the consequential cost of labour and materials to repair the breakdown. The required resources may not be readily available resulting in further delays, expense and lost service levels.

It is widely recognised and documented through independent research that manufacturing organisations with critical equipment, 24 x 7 operations or downtime in excess of industry standards can maximise output and minimise costs by investing in effective asset management systems. As plant and equipment can consume as much as 40% of operational expenditure in manufacturing environments any improvements can have a significant impact on management initiatives to drive down the unit cost of production. Effective maintenance practices can also reduce overall cycle times by increasing reliability and availability.

Agility provides the tools to effectively manage reactive work requests and schedule preventative maintenance including plant shutdowns. Multi-site capabilities provide cost saving opportunities to rationalise equipment and spare part usage while budget and cost controls give managers the analysis to monitor performance

You want effective two-way communications across your team

Agility’s helpdesk empowers your operators and engineers to quickly and easily contribute to the smooth running of your plant. Using self service work requests, problems (and potential problems) can be easily reported online.

Work orders, ranging from small repairs to requests for more project-based work, like an equipment overhaul, can be logged and assigned using Agility. The requests can then be reviewed by the maintenance manager and allocated either internally or to an appropriate contractor.

Performance / Compliance

‘Accountability’ has become a buzz word in your organisation

Agility allows you to set and monitor your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Metrics can be tailored to match your Service Level Agreement (SLAs) and a couple of clicks will give you a clear visual picture of your workload and your team’s performance. A couple more clicks and all the graphs and documents you need can be pulled into attractive and useful reports that will give an overview of your performance.

Agility schedules can be set up to ensure that statutory inspections and critical tasks (e.g. maintenance, training, health and safety assessments) are completed by the correctly qualified operative, rigorously and on time. The relevant documentation can be automatically generated and is always easy to find.

Schedules, Resources and SLA’s

You want to keep on top of your schedule

You want to spot issues before they become problems, prevent accidents before they happen and track work accurately so you have a transparent overview of activities and performance and can easily identify improvement areas.

Agility allows you to prioritise and schedule repairs and requests into regular rotas for the maintenance team. Once the schedule is created, Agility will automatically generate planned preventative maintenance (PPM) work orders. Each PPM work order can be given a lead time so that the job is created with enough time in advance of the start for any planning required to be carried out.

You want to send the right person for the job – first time, every time

In Agility you can automatically check an employee’s skills and availability. You can click and find free time slots in the chosen date range and track employees backlog jobs and current jobs, with live status updates.

You want your staff to get the credit that they deserve

Agility offers you a clear overview of the work that needs to be done, so you can confirm resourcing levels, see response times, manage and assess all tasks carried out.

Agility monitoring enables you to check the performance of third party suppliers and prove the quality and quantity of the work done by your department.

You run a team of operators and engineers not fire-fighters

Everyone knows that regular maintenance helps keep a plant and its equipment running smoothly. Urgent situations will inevitably arise but keeping a tight maintenance schedule and a good overview of work requests in Agility will hopefully mean that they are few and far between.

You want hard evidence that your maintenance strategy is working

Agility allows engineering managers to assess proactive and reactive repair activities and provides correlation between the two, making it valuable in assessing the maintenance strategies in place and identifying areas of strength and weakness.

Mobile Working

Your team is always on the move

The Agility internet / intranet portal gives engineers and operators easy access to operational information in order to make informed decisions quickly, based on up-to-the-minute intelligence.

As a browser–based system Agility can be securely accessed via the web. This means the external contractors can be given remote access to the system. The simple secure operator interface is also easy and quick to use at any computer terminal.

In addition to PC-based access, Agility Mobile Expert ensures that your team is always in contact. PDAs, Rugged devices and touch screen tablets can log, receive and update work orders, helping you to align and monitor your mobile workforce such as mobile technicians.

Stock Control

You’d like your inventory to almost manage itself

Agility allows you to manage your inventory and stock movements. Good stock management ensures that you are only stocking exactly what you need (and helps you to avoid tying up capital in slow moving inventory items).

Agility can monitor storage location, transactions, returns and stock levels and allows links to photographs. They can also be categorised as stocked / non stocked parts.

Work orders can be created to include every item used for every job and low stock flags can be automatically triggered when appropriate. Preferred and back up suppliers and historical costs can all be quickly retrived and quick links to a supplier’s website can be stored.

Agility can also create Purchase Orders (POs) for stock reordering – in an approved format with agreed sign off structures. Once approved the system can also dispatch the order by email to the approved suppliers.

Configuration, Data and Reports

You want to decide what data is useful

Agility allows you to configure the system to suit your needs. You decide what you want to measure, adding the data fields that you need. You can also customise your key performance indicators (KPIs) and record all of your site details in an easy to navigate asset register.

Utilise Agility’s report and Key Performance Indicators to understand the true cost of your maintenance activities to make much more informed commercial decisions.

You want to access data in different ways for different purposes

Calendar based planned preventative maintenance (PPM) can be used to generate reports and Hours/ Usage can be analysed to assess equipment efficiency. Breakdowns and mean time between failures (MTBF) can also be monitored. Agility’s graphical planning board ensures that the relevant information can be quickly selected and compiled into attractive useful reports for management meetings, compliance and health and safety record keeping.