Bis Industries is the leading provider of underground equipment services providing critical mining equipment to the resources industry. Its Underground division supplies equipment to the coal industry on Australia’s East Coast. This division needs to ensure that the equipment the company supplies moves quickly through the inspection process so it can go from job site to job site without compromising performance or the customer experience.
Each piece of equipment Bis hired out to a mine site went through a pre-hire and post-hire inspection. Once both inspections were completed, any damage incurred to the equipment was charged to the customer.
In the past, Bis personnel manually uploaded all inspection materials (e.g. photographs and forms) to a spreadsheet for its external workshop. The workshop then priced the job. Only when Bis approved the priced scope of work and sent it back to the workshop did work commence on the asset.
These paper-based processes took time, slowing invoices by a span of months.
Without a central database for asset maintenance history and information, Bis personnel, its workshops and its customers had limited visibility into the condition of assets and the scopes of work for their repairs. In some cases, customers refused to pay for repairs based on how old the damage claims were.
Bis Industries sought a solution that would eliminate manual processing so it could hire and maintain assets more quickly. The company used Cloud Inventory to create a mobile app that could complete inspections and integrate with its ERP, Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne.
Cloud Inventory includes a rapid application development platform, and Bis used its drag-and-drop interface to design a mobile app that met its unique needs.
Deployed on ruggedized tablets, the app allowed inspectors to take pictures and easily answer questions—and record that information in the back-end system. Users could also create scopes of work through the ERP at the time of customer sign-off. The app took the same questions inspectors responded to in paper-based forms and combined them with model work orders, which allowed them to report over each asset’s maintenance history.
During the post-hire inspection, the user could now see pre-hire responses and images within the app. “This allowed the user to clearly see if the equipment had been damaged since it went to the customer site,” the Bis Industries representative said. “If the post-hire inspection was completed on-site, the customer would be able to see what damage they were found responsible for and sign off on the inspection.”
Since deployment, the mobile app has streamlined asset maintenance. Now, Bis Industries mechanics, as well as suppliers and customers, can see and use information from the Cloud Inventory app.
“Since there are no manual processes to input recorded data, personnel can now spend time looking at machines and resolving mechanical issues instead of sitting in front of a computer,” said the representative.
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