Helping mid-size plants improve their maintenance with Coswin Light

Dear Readers,

This month’s “Maintenance in China” newsletter revolves around Coswin Light, the preconfigured version of our CMMS Coswin, tailored to the needs and budget of small-to-mid-size facilities.

I have to admit that we have struggled over the years with how to help such companies to improve their maintenance (and to gain business with them!). Their needs are fairly well identified (“build up a modern maintenance organization”) and not very different from their larger counterparts, apart from resource and budget limitations.

We have tried various approaches such as offering a service package comprising coaching services (a dedicated Siveco engineers coming to site on a regular basis to assist the maintenance team in their professionalization and improvement process), with or without a leased CMMS – more often than not without the CMMS as customers’ budget could hardly cover both. As we know well, it is nearly impossible to build a sustainable organization with consulting and training services alone, without the CMMS to anchor the new systematic processes (such as preventive maintenance and analysis meetings). The high turnover experienced by most companies in China is one of the major obstacles we face.

Another approach we tried was to use our bluebee^® cloud SaaS platform (SaaS meaning “Software as a Service” – you just connect to our website to run the CMMS). This has not picked up commercially, perhaps because of Siveco’s own focus on very large multisite bluebee^® cloud customers… Technologically, the infrastructure is there (and a few customers use it), but more packaging effort is required on our side (configuration, documentation) to make the system as easy to use as possible, without required a lot of consulting services. Culturally, we still find a lot of companies are reluctant to let their data reside outside of the company’s own server.

The answer to this challenge is Coswin Light, an easy-to-install prepackaged CMMS, which is installed on the customer’s own PC-server, requiring little consulting services so the focus can remain on maintenance improvement and coaching services.

This is the topic of our newsletter this month, with a Reliability article on the typical service package we offer; Customer stories on existing Coswin Light users in China; a Partners page where we explain what kind of introductory partners we are looking for; Tips & Tricks on the features of Coswin Light. Finally, our latest news – many exiting news this month including two awards we have received!

Enjoy the newsletter!

Bruno Lhopiteau
General Manager
Siveco China

Tags： SMEs、Coswin Light