Today, low code application development platforms are becoming the go-to option for enterprises to accelerate their digital journeys. According to Gartner, “low-code application platforms (LCAP) are expected to remain the largest component of the low-code development technology market through 2022, increasing nearly 30% from 2020 to reach $5.8 billion in 2021.”
What do you need to know about low code application development platforms?
A low code application development platform empowers professional IT developers and streamlines enterprise-wide workflows by enabling rapid development and deployment of complex, context-aware, and customer-centric business applications. It can help enterprises deliver a frictionless and hassle-free experience to their customers, employees, and partners.
With a low code platform, enterprises can:
Enable end-to-end automation of complex and content-centric business processes
Create domain-rich solutions to cater to dynamically evolving business requirements
Rapidly design and develop enterprise-grade applications for web and mobile
Drive continuous process improvement and enable a rich user experience with new-age technologies
Key business benefits to unlock
Ensure happy customers: Today’s tech-savvy customers want you to respond quickly to their evolving needs. Here, low code arrives as a savior by allowing you to rapidly adapt to the changing market and customer needs.
Empower IT: IT teams are burdened with the maintenance of systems with periodic updates, compliance checks, and various performance measurements. You can minimize this technical burden by automating such recurring tasks through low code capabilities, thereby letting your IT team handle more critical and dynamic processes.
Enable Faster go-to-market: The platform can help reduce application development duration through reusable components and drag-and-drop tools. This enables enterprises to bring their applications to market quickly and timely incorporate any required changes.
Enhance IT governance: Shadow IT is one of the most significant areas of concern for enterprises as it accrues technical debt and affects its overall risk monitoring. Low code deftly handles shadow IT by reducing dependency on third-party applications and ensuring a collaboration-driven work environment. Low code boosts IT governance by doing away with data, process, and security vulnerabilities.
Your enterprise can gain much more than speed and agility by leveraging low code with a suitable platform. Read this whitepaper to learn how a low code-based digital transformation platform can help organizations unlock simplicity by managing their content, processes, and communications.
It’s about time you started taking care of your equipment. It’s not just about whether or not you’re working with the latest and greatest, it’s about making sure that what you have is up and running as efficiently as possible. You don’t want to find out that your equipment needs repair in the middle of a critical operation, or worse: when it breaks down completely. That can lead to lost time, money, and even injury.
But why does this happen?
A lot of facilities and maintenance managers find it challenging to manage their preventive maintenance programs without using spreadsheets—but spreadsheets can be time-consuming, get lost among other paperwork, or be downright frustrating.
Preventive maintenance (sometimes called preventative) software enables managers to schedule maintenance, send alerts to the right people when a job is due, and increase resource access and allocation. It also keeps equipment operating efficiently, increases the safety of employees, and helps you avoid costly repairs down the road. In this article, we will discuss preventive maintenance software, why its used, examples, and some important things to consider when implementing it at your organization.
What is preventive maintenance software (and who uses it)?
Preventive maintenance software is used to help schedule ongoing preventive maintenance work. It allows companies to be proactive about their maintenance, rather than reactive. It’s often used by maintenance and plant managers and other industrial and maintenance personnel. It’s used because it’s one of the best solutions to avoid unexpected repairs. By planning your preventive maintenance schedule, you can be proactive about the regular checkups that keep your equipment running smoothly.
Three steps to consider when choosing a preventive maintenance software
1. Understand at what level your organization manages preventive maintenance
Before choosing your preventive maintenance software it’s important to first understand at what level your organization manages preventive maintenance. If you have a large company with many different sites, it would be beneficial for you to use something like a CMMS. This will allow your sites and teams access to the same information and data.
Whereas, a good fit for a smaller organization may be a single-site solution. The next step to consider is how much money you want to spend or can spend on a solution. While there are programs that are low cost, and sometimes free, others may need more funding to run properly and improve your processes.
2. Assess your needs vs. your wants
When choosing the right preventive maintenance software, it’s important to first assess your wants and needs. This means reviewing your processes and seeing how they can be improved with the software. Think about what features the software has that can improve efficiencies for your team and maintenance process, and ask yourself:
What are my goals?
How much time do I have to dedicate to a project? (Consider if there’s already a system that needs improving)
What kind of data do I want to track? (Think about how many assets you have, and how many technicians and managers you employ)
3. Stick to the financial budget
Every maintenance team needs to stick to its financial budget, and choosing preventive maintenance software can be costly. When you’re making a decision consider the budget you have available and the structure of the business. This will help you determine the best solution. In addition, it’s important to keep future scenarios in mind, and financial forecast and plan for things like: business growth, new facilities, and economic downturns.
Types of preventive maintenance software
Preventive maintenance software comes in all shapes and sizes, from extremely specialized systems to giant platforms connecting maintenance to other business units. Below are the most common types of preventive maintenance software.
1. Computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS)
CMMS software and maintenance apps help maintenance teams keep detailed and centralized records of all assets, equipment, and completed work. A CMMS allows facilities to plan, track, and optimize work orders, inventory, and everything associated with maintenance.
A CMMS manages all the maintenance activities that take place during the operational part of an asset’s life. At the same time, this type of preventive maintenance software works as a productive part of a facility.
All CMMS preventive maintenance software can be divided into two groups: Cloud-based CMMS software and on-premise CMMS software.
2. Enterprise asset management (EAM)
EAM software provides a holistic view of an organization’s physical assets and infrastructure throughout its entire lifecycle, from design and procurement to operation, maintenance, disposal, and replacement. EAM systems record asset information, manage work orders, coordinate inventory purchasing and usage, organize labor, track contracts, measure costs, and spending, and calculate KPIs.
3. Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
Here’s how ERP software works: every company has different business units that make it function, like accounting, human resources, and maintenance. ERP software takes everything these different departments do and connects them, so the entire organization has the same processes and information.
Because there is one central place for all data, it means an accountant, a salesperson, a maintenance technician, and a CEO can all use the system for their day-to-day activities while relying on the same information to plan, assess, and complete those activities. By collecting transactional data from multiple sources, ERP systems eliminate data duplication, offer data integrity, and provide a single source of truth.
While it’s not exactly maintenance software, ERP systems are part of the larger maintenance technology ecosystem. It’s important for maintenance technology to be able to integrate with an ERP system to help keep accurate inventory levels and keep your finance team in the loop. Many other preventive maintenance technologies are used in asset-heavy production and manufacturing facilities.
Steps to take when integrating preventive maintenance software at your organization
Integrating any type of new technology or software into an existing workplace can be challenging, but taking the right steps will make the process much easier for everyone involved in using the new technology. Here are the steps to follow when implementing a new preventive maintenance software:
Recognize that integration is a process, not an event. Integrating preventive maintenance software involves a lot of planning, and preparation, as well as addressing technical challenges that may occur prior to the implementation and cause risk, and a plan of action for when and if those challenges occur.
Plan at the right level. You will inevitably ask yourself if it makes sense to integrate this software with the existing systems or processes, but you need to plan ahead for the future as well. For example, if you’re integrating a CMMS for multiple facilities and warehouses, you can easily integrate them together from day one—rather than having two separate systems talking to each other through other means (like an email).
Recognize that acceptance of the new software won’t always be smooth. Read that again. It’s hard for managers to recognize that their team may not embrace the new software with open arms. You may face challenges and questions about the software, why it’s being used, and how exactly it’s going to save time and money. Be prepared to address these concerns and work with your team to get into the new processes. With time, your team will recognize how valuable software like a CMMS or ERP really is.
The right maintenance software can help your company save money and reduce downtime
By implementing preventive maintenance software your team can become more proactive about your maintenance. The first step is to assess where preventive maintenance occurs in your organization, and next, you need to review your current needs and wants so that when you find the right software for your organization there are no surprises.
Robotic process automation (RPA) is rather exciting in a company’s digital transformation journey. Robotic process automation utilizes a set of automation technologies to handle repetitive and mundane human tasks. The software emerged in the early 2000s and, since then, has become one of the most effective tools for businesses to maximize their process efficiency. COVID-19 has only accelerated enterprises’ interest in robotic process automation to digitally power their key business processes. Gartner projected global RPA revenue will reach nearly $1.89 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow into double digits by 2024.
Unparallel Advantages of Robotic Process Automation
If we look at RPA very closely, it is more than just hype. It solves many common problems for companies of all sizes. RPA is a boon to tackle challenges such as low process visibility, inefficient manual tasks, and poor exception handling, to name a few. By leveraging RPA, organizations have experienced significant positive outcomes, including increased efficiency, higher accuracy, better security, and frees the bandwidth of knowledge workers.
Discover the Core Capabilities of Robotic Process Automation
Various use cases need different types of RPA bots, making it necessary for firms to ensure that their RPA initiatives are founded on a clear strategy and good governance. Some of the fundamental capabilities of robotic process automation system include:
Bot Scripting
Bot scripters can allow firms to easily create bot conversations and perform web/desktop automation. This allows seamless integration with commercial and open-source bots. Cognitive bots provide an additional AI edge to process automation.
Bot Process Designer
A bot process designer can allow firms to configure and manage bots, organizations can study existing processes and develop roadmaps for RPA integrations into the right processes. A bot process designer helps configure exceptions, alerts, business rules, and more. It empowers business users to easily identify, measure, and resolves bottlenecks. The capability can provide instant access to information and enhance turnaround time.
Robot Control Center
The bot control center provides workload management, actionable process analytics, and bot deployment in multiple environments, which can increase operational efficiency and decrease errors. The control center allows firms to monitor and manage robotic agents in real-time.
RPA will continue to play a significant role across a range of industries from shared services, insurance, banking to healthcare, and more. Robotic process automation can deliver value to organizations, but it is important for firms to leverage the tool strategically with business process management software (BPM). Firms have to be careful of not falling into a data rabbit hole with their RPA initiatives by viewing RPA as a part of the solution as not an end in itself.
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