Maintenance app: who installs it, why it gets abandoned and what happens with no app at all

What a maintenance app is

People also search for it as “maintenance management app” or “maintenance application”, and it is nearly always the mobile side of something bigger: maintenance software or a CMMS that lives on the office computer and puts three screens on the phone. The first is for reporting: pick the area, write what is wrong and attach a picture. The second is the technician's job list, with what is pending that day. The third is the close-out: mark it finished, note what was replaced and, in some, sign with a finger.

Those three screens take for granted something that is true in a factory and not in a bar: that everyone involved has the application downloaded, an account open and the habit of looking at it. The useful question is not what the app does, but how many pockets it will actually be in.

Who has to open it: four different phones

A fault passes through four pairs of hands. The app asks something of each, and each has its own reason not to do it.

The in-house technician is the only one of the four for whom the app is his tool. The other three experience it as one more chore. That is why so many roll-outs end with a technician who logs everything himself: he takes the call, opens the application and creates the report in the caller's name.

Why apps are abandoned where staff turn over

In hospitality, retail or sport, people come and go. A restaurant with twenty people on the payroll may have registered twice that number by the end of the year, between extras, cover and high season. Every newcomer is an install, an account and an explanation. What tends to happen:

• The phone is theirs. Asking an employee to put a work application on their private phone does not always go down well: many have neither the storage nor the inclination.
• The password is forgotten. Someone who reports a problem every three weeks does not remember their login on the day they need it, and resetting it takes longer than telling the manager.
• Saturday's extra does not exist for the app. They work two nights, see the coffee machine leaking and have no way to say so. They mention it out loud, and out loud is where it stays.
• There is no signal in the basement. The cold room, the boiler room and the store are exactly where faults turn up and where an application loads worst.
• The supplier has thirty customers. If each one asks for its own app, he installs none. He works by phone and by message, and the end of the job goes unrecorded.
• Nobody removes the people who leave. Their user stays active until someone happens to notice.

The sign that an app has fallen out of use shows early: within a few months the reports are back in the WhatsApp group or in “when you get a minute”, and the application only holds the ones the technician entered himself. What is lost with the group, and what the data protection authority has said about it, is in WhatsApp group or incident manager.

When an app is the right tool

It is not all turnover. There are teams where the application earns its place on the phone:

• An in-house maintenance team that starts the morning with a route and ticks it off.
• Jobs that need a point-by-point checklist, such as the weekly round of a swimming pool or a boiler room.
• Technicians who point the camera at the label on a machine to open its record and see what was done last time.
• Job sheets the customer signs on screen, as a maintenance contractor does when working on someone else's site.
• Areas with no signal where the work has to carry on offline and sync on the way out.

If you recognise yourselves in that list, what you want is the app of a CMMS. How that work is organised is in work order management and preventive maintenance software; the products, in best CMMS. It is the norm in industrial units and warehouses with their own workshop.

Seven questions for an app demo

Ask for answers with the phone in hand, not on slides:

• How many taps from the home screen to sending a report with a photo? Count them out loud. Beyond five, the night shift will not get to the end.
• Does the person reporting need a user? And if so, who creates it, how long it takes and what you do about the temp who comes for one weekend.
• What does the outside supplier receive? An email, a link or a notification from an app he does not have. Ask how he confirms he has finished.
• Does it work with no signal? Try it there and then, in flight mode.
• What does the person who reported see? Whether they can follow their report without logging in anywhere or have to go and ask.
• Who finds out if nobody responds? An unread report at midnight on a Friday is the real exam.
• What happens when someone leaves the company? How access is withdrawn and whose name their open reports end up under.

The same questions work for reporting applications that are not about maintenance; several of them, described with what their own websites say, are in incident management app.

The alternative: no app and the WhatsApp you already have

There is another way to deal with those four phones: ask nobody to install anything. The business has a WhatsApp number for faults; whoever sees one writes it there, and a system behind the number does the work the application would do. That is how Bedel works, so it is worth saying plainly: Bedel is not a maintenance app. It is not in the app stores and there is nothing to download.

What there is, is this. The people the site has put on its list write to the number: a few lines, a photo on its own or a voice note. Bedel opens a ticket with a number and a time, and if it is not clear where the problem is, it asks. The ticket goes to the technician or supplier it belongs to, who sees it on their own WhatsApp. When someone accepts it and when it is closed, the person who reported gets a message. What the site has flagged as urgent rings the on-call phone even at three in the morning, and a ticket that runs out of time goes up to the person above. Three times are kept, reported, accepted and closed, and the whole list downloads as an Excel file. Once a month, whoever runs maintenance gets the dated inspections that are coming up, by WhatsApp.

The manager does have a screen: a web panel opened from the browser to see the tickets and their times. But nobody on the team, neither the technician nor the supplier, downloads an application or memorises a password. The whole journey, with examples, is in incident management on WhatsApp, and which steps run by themselves, in automatic incidents on WhatsApp.

What Bedel does not do

Doing without the app has a cost, and it is better seen before you start. Bedel is not a CMMS, nor a pocket version of one:

• There are no checklists for the technician to tick, no on-screen signature and no label scanning with the camera.
• It has no record for each machine: it does not know which model of oven you have or which part was replaced last year.
• It does not hand out work orders with their materials, hours and what they cost.
• It does not file inspection reports or certificates; those stay in your binder.
• It does not link to other software, a CMMS included: what you take out is the Excel file.
• It does not gather several sites in one view: each site has its own account and its own number.
• It does not serve the public: a restaurant customer or a gym member cannot open a ticket.

If something important to you is on that list, you need an app with a full product behind it, and the WhatsApp way in can sit alongside it for reports from the staff who never get round to installing it. By type of business: restaurants, hotels, gyms and shops. And if you have no maintenance department, CMMS for small business explains what you can leave out of a big system.