Handheld Computing Increases Productivity

Fleet Support Limited (FSL) maintains and repairs ships and facilities at the Portsmouth Naval Base in the United Kingdom. FSL's growth and acquisition of new contracts (including a 2002 contract for partnering services with the Ministry of Defense [MoD]) extended the scope of work and responsibilities for FSL, creating the need to get more work done and recorded more efficiently. Much of FSL's work had nothing to do with shipbuilding and everything to do with maintaining their client's properties and facilities. Seven dry docks and several workshops on the naval base encompass a wide variety of equipment and buildings. These properties require a variety of maintenance schedules and procedures. The responsibility of maintenance lies with FSL Facilities Services, FSL's facilities management division.

An average of 4,000 work orders are created each month through FSL's customer service center. People using the company's facilities would call the center to report problems of all types, from leaky pipes and blocked toilets to cranes that got stuck with a 20-ton load hanging in the air. The resulting work orders would then be created in Maximo, an enterprise asset management program from IBM. The company was using Maximo as a desktop system to report on key performance indicators, manage work and resource allocation, and collect critical data on asset performance and reliability. In the field, however, technicians were still using paper work orders. "There was a temptation for engineers to carry out quick 5-minute jobs without a work order," says Mick Huitson, facilities plant maintenance manager at FSL. "Thus, some jobs were not even recorded."

Completed work orders were returned to the company's office and placed in a traditional ‘in/out' paper tray system for manual entry into the Maximo system. Once the tray was full, work orders were sorted into numerical order and filed into archive folders. Locating historical data was a tedious task, and if a paper work order was lost or illegible, valuable data was lost. "The resultant pile of paper required a lot of collation and filing," says Huitson. "One hundred fifty guys were turning things in on a daily basis, and at the end of the week, we were chasing people for work orders."