COVID-19 is slowly becoming the new norm, and many believe that it will impact our lives and the way we approach work for good. It is time to switch our focus from short-term fixes that will “hold us over” to long-term solutions which can provide you and your employees with both safety and continuous growth in even the worst of times.

The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work has compiled an extensive set of information and preventative advice for workplaces, but new rules and regulations are coming into place on an almost daily basis. McKinsey set out three rules for manufacturing companies to follow, which will enable companies to cope with the changes:

  1. Protect the workforce
  2. Manage risks to ensure business continuity
  3. Drive productivity at a distance

Here is a quick glimpse of how the Accruent Portfolio can enable you to follow these simple rules and not only get through COVID-19 but also achieve business success while keeping your employees safe.

Unlock Engineering Document Management with Meridian

Accruent’s Meridian solution offers a comprehensive, CAD-software agnostic solution for engineering drawing management where users can easily store, manage, render, and visualize both 2D and 3D content from any major CAD system.

Organizations can keep their master data up to date while organizing their change processes in isolated work areas using workflows and data validation. They can also provide a full audit trail for regulatory compliance.

Users can manage Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, scanned images and hybrid files, allowing Meridian to be the ultimate repository for consolidating all legacy and project-related engineering information

What About COVID-19?

One of the most significant changes COVID-19 has brought into our lives is that many of us now work from home. This is particularly challenging for manufacturing companies who need to have engineers on-site to keep the plant operational. Protecting their workforce while keeping productivity high is the number one goal of organaizations during this pandemic. How is that accomplished?

Organizations can enable engineers to work from home as much as possible with our Meridian Cloud solution. Unlike On-Prem EDM (Engineering document Management), a SaaS solution offers much greater flexibility for remote work and much lower risks for employees.

Benefits and Features

By pivoting to Meridian, users are empowered to:

  • Use cloud solutions unbound to any network and from any location on a variety of devices
  • Adopt fast deployment and services more quickly than on-premise solutions
  • Scale up and down, allowing organizations to use operation budgets versus making significant capital investments
  • Maintain simpler and faster upgrade cycles to ensure access to the most recent version of an application
  • Ensures 24/7 human monitoring and fortified data centers with secure, public cloud infrastructure
  • Speed up development processes on building new functionality
  • Increase reliability and availability of our solution
  • Extract more intelligence from the data to help set product roadmaps
Further Reading & Resources:
  1. Whitepaper: 3 Key Things Organizations Should Consider When Determining Cloud Readiness
  2. Webinar: Work from Home with Meridian Cloud
  3. Blog Post: Going Remote: How Leveraging SaaS EDM Solutions Keeps Companies Running

 

Consolidate Enterprise Asset Management with Maintenance Connection

Accruent’s enterprise asset management software Maintenance Connection provides organizations with the ability to plan, execute and report on the maintenance efforts throughout the entirety of an asset’s lifecycle, from initial procurement to final decommissioning.

Maintenance Connection combines the foundations of a traditional CMMS software with the enterprise-ready scalability of an EAM software to help digitize your asset management strategies.

What About COVID-19?

Taking care of the people who still need to come on-site is paramount in any manager’s mind. As if keeping track of who works when was not enough of a hassle, organizations now need to minimize the number of people in the same area, avoid overlaps in schedules, and make sure no employee gets overworked.

Maintenance Connection can help you accomplish all of those thing while integrating with Meridian for seamless experience data sharing across teams. This powerful CMMS solution allows organizations to set timelines and schedules for employees in order to track when and where their jobs and work orders are located.

By understanding where employees are, you can better allocate resources and manpower, minimizing risk and ultimately driving productivity in this challenging period.

Benefits and Features

By pivoting to Maintenance Connection, users are empowered to:

  • Increase cleaning scheduling from monthly to daily
  • Improve cleaning procedures to be COVID-19 compliant
  • Highlight assets that are “high traffic” so engineers can try to avoid them and only carry out cleaning after hours
  • Create alerts to let people know when an asset is in a high traffic area
  • Stagger work orders to avoid overcrowded locations
  • Use mobile MC Express to avoid sharing devices/kiosks, which could present a health risk
  • Collaborate on a project remotely with multiple users
  • Add any necessary health procedures as tasks within the work orders
  • Use Talk-to-Text to avoid typing and avoid potential risk
Further Reading & Resources:

Move from Reactive to Proactive Maintenance with vx Observe

Accruent’s vx Observe is an IoT platform that displays the status of equipment alarms, asset performance data, and repair work orders on a single, mobile-friendly interface. Its interface can combine assets from different classes, locations and manufacturers for convenient and timely visibility.

vx Observe automates the identification of equipment problems, reduces nuisance alarms, and reduces service response time to minimize asset downtime, decrease service expenses and prolong asset life.

What about COVID-19?

Another great way to reduce the need for employees to come on-site is by using Remote Asset Monitoring with vx Observe. Rather than sending in engineers or maintenance crews to check if equipment is malfunctioning, users can rely on sensors to gather data and tell you exactly when an asset is malfunctioning, so you only bring someone in for a genuine emergency. This will allow organizations to minimize the risk of close contact, while maintaining productivity at a distance.

Benefits and Features

By pivoting to vx Observe, users are empowered to:

  • Avoid sending maintenance and engineering on-site for false alarms
  • Create a digital version of your assets which can be monitored remotely
  • Offload asset monitoring from your engineer’s workload to vx Observe
  • Predict asset breakdowns and perform timely repairs to help extend asset life
  • Avoid having to replace assets during a period of uncertainty by leveraging predictive maintenance
  • Monitor trends across all your sites and push through changes remotely
  • Increase energy and labour savings
Further Reading & Resources:

Space Planning with EMS

Accruent’s EMS platform is the leading provider of meeting and room scheduling software.

By offering extensive depth and breadth of functionality, EMS connects people with spaces, resources, and technology -- helping organizations to increase productivity, attract and retain people, reduce costs, and differentiate their brand.

What about COVID-19?

Brookfield made an interesting prediction in light of COVID-19, stating that office space will increase rather than shrink. Using EMS, companies can maintain a collaborative office by managing space efficiently and ensuring employee satisfaction and comfortability.

Our solution will give your employees the flexibility to hot desk and check on the number of people in any given office or meeting room to assess how comfortable and how safe they feel in that space. Through space management, organizations can actively regulate where employees are and measure their distances from each other.

Instead of a mish-mash of different and often tricky office appointments, users can view when and where they are in relation to other employees and plan accordingly.

Benefits and Features

By pivoting to EMS, users are empowered to:

  • Allow employees to borrow office equipment for their home office while keeping track of it
  • Duplicate events for a later date instead of cancelling and starting from scratch again
  • Use “Change Status Wizard” to edit multiple events at once
  • Stop users from booking spaces that are closed because of COVID-19
  • Include new COVID-19 procedures in Room Booking templates
  • Run reports to see which spaces are used more heavily so you can prioritize them for cleaning
  • Consider EMS Cloud Services to give everyone easy access remotely
Further Reading & Resources:

Facing the New Norm Head-On

As COVID-19 moves from pandemic to the new norm, it is increasingly critical that organizations look to the future. The aftereffects of COVID-19 will be felt for a long time, and offices and how we work within them will be changed for good.

It is essential, then, for organizations to look for solutions that not only work in the short term, but in the long term as well. Our Accruent portfolio enables and empowers organizations with solutions that keep your employees safe, while maintaining future profits and productivity.

For more information, speak to an expert today.