Terra Nova, enabling mobile field service for Chinese infrastructures

Experience has shown the limitations of PC-based solutions to support large geographically dispersed organizations, where technicians work primarily outside of the office. While the complexity of the planning process (spanning millions of equipments, thousands of workers, hundreds of facilities, tools, parts) can be handled by an advanced computerized maintenance management system, its inevitable combination with paper work orders (or log books) creates additional complexity in the administrative process (approval of the various work preparation steps, work permits, feedback of information from the field). This usually results in very administratively-driven project, with very long implementation time, offering little or no support for what technicians need most (diagnosis support, access to information and expertise). In the end, such implementation often leads to disappointing results.

As far as the fast growing Chinese infrastructure market is concerned, specific constraints come into play, namely the sheer size of projects, the large workforce and its limited exposure to advanced maintenance practices. The corresponding advantages would be the ability to address maintenance issues from the construction stage (most projects are greenfield), modern equipment with a high degree of automation and young engineers open to new technology (who doesn’t have a smartphone in China?).

As part of the preparation for a training program for India’s Ministry of Railways executives in 2009, in partnership with leading business school HEC, Siveco China conducted an analysis of CMMS implementation in railways. The survey, based on cases in Western Europe, India and China, showed that the use of mobile solutions, integrated with the existing back-office systems (often highly customized CMMS or ERP systems) would greatly simplify projects (with regards to the work order process). Leading to a better utilization of the systems, it would significantly improve the ROI of these large-scale projects (ranging from tens to hundreds of millions of RMB).

With a 25 years history as Europe’s leading maintenance system supplier, Siveco has been at the forefront of mobile innovations for field service (construction, maintenance, inspections etc.) with applications running on either tablet PCs (Mtv) or PDA/Smartphones (bluebee^®).

The company’s experience with Chinese construction projects (both in China and in export markets working together with Chinese EPCs) has driven homegrown development of mobile solutions – with the setup of Siveco China R&D Center in Shanghai at the end of 2008. Siveco solutions feature highly intuitive user interfaces, designed “by maintenance people for maintenance people”, as opposed to usual IT developments, which attempt to squeeze PC-like screens into a smaller format. Projects can start as small as one user (construction staff at several sites in China currently use COSWIN Surveyor to build-up their facility database) to thousands of devices (this article features a short case study of FM service supplier Dalkia, with over 3500 devices).

As noted by Bruno Lhopiteau, General Manager of Siveco China: “The powerful technological engine behind our mobile solutions is provided by French company Telelogos, represented in China by its distributor Terra Nova Telecom. This technical infrastructure allows us to focus on user experience and maintenance improvement rather than IT, while Terra Nova’s proven track record with very large mobile deployments will allow us to tackle major projects”.

With nearly 30 years of expertise in software solutions for device management, data synchronization, data transfer for remote terminals, mobile devices and automated terminals, Telelogos (represented by Terra Nova Telecom in the Chinese market, providing full technical support) is an ISO 9001-certified software editor boasting an installed based of over 250,000 licenses (2,000 customers).

Traveling employees, such as technicians, team supervisors and operation people, must have powerful communication tools to trace, manage and monitor their interventions. These employees’ responsiveness and performance depends on the selected business applications. These mobile applications have constraints which are different from those headquarters, such as:

• Remote users
• Users’ acceptance of applications
• No permanent connection
• Bandwidth
• Online/offline mode
• PDA terminal:

o Battery life
o Limited CPU
o All users are administrators
o No daily reboot
o Screen size

Some of these constraints, such as the need for an ergonomic interface, can be resolved by developing business applications, as Siveco has done. To resolve other constraints, companies will need to purchase a device management software solution: Telelogos’ MediaTransfer and MediaContact solutions answers the needs to synchronize, update, configure and monitor your terminals in real time.

A subsidiary of French companies Veolia Environnement and EDF, Dalkia is the European leader in energy services for government institutions and companies. Its activities include integrated onsite energy management, district heating and cooling systems management, services for industry, and global facilities management. Facilities maintenance is guaranteed by 7,000 field technicians – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

As part of its information system overhaul, Dalkia wanted to equip all its traveling service technicians with a communicating mobile solution to optimize the entire information management chain, and to provide clients with real-time service tracking via its extranet.

Considering the number of terminals and their distribution throughout the service area, the necessity of remotely managing PDAs and embedded applications had to be addressed in order to guarantee continuing optimal service and to facilitate future service dispatches.

Dalkia chose HP 6300 terminals. Complete technical services management for the solution was awarded to Econocom, a Telelogos Certified Partner company. The management infrastructure is based on two MediaContact servers with load distribution in a secure data center. MediaContact intelligent agent for Windows Mobile is loaded on the PDAs and runs in transparent mode without the need for any user intervention.

Since technicians’ service stops are frequently in underground locations, the GPRS connection from the terminal to the server is intermittent and depends on a MediaContact synchronization mode. Synchronization is scheduled to occur twice daily and can be executed manually by an Econocom help desk engineer. MediaContact handles terminal hardware and software inventory, and automatic distribution of application updates. The software is also used to remotely activate or deactivate Wi-Fi. Various failure-prevention processes have been progressively implemented using MediaContact intelligent agent monitoring information, like the management of memory usage threshold alerts.

After an initial prototype stage, a pilot project involving 300 technicians was completed. The solution was then deployed to 3,200 additional roving technicians. Dalkia has already planned to implement it in other European countries, which would include another several thousand technicians. Solution support is handled by only three Econocom engineers for the 3,500-PDA system. A two-day technical training session was required to get them fully up and running with the MediaContact software.

“Given the number of PDAs that were deployed, it was critical from the project’s outset to consider a solution for managing the terminals. MediaContact gives us real control over the entire fleet of PDAs while increasing their availability and without hindering users.”

Fabrice Jean
Dalkia’s Mobile Applications Project Manager

Other joint Telelogos-Siveco customers include high-speed railway operator SNCF, Paris Airport Authority, utility giant GDF SUEZ, Hongkong conglomerate Swire, food and beverage companies Heineken, Nestle and Kraft, supermarket chain Champion etc.

The obvious complementarity of Siveco and Terra Nova makes for an attractive partnership to address the needs of Chinese infrastructures. By providing mobile field service solutions, either on top of legacy systems (our solutions can synchronize with various CMMS or equipment databases) or as part of a total Siveco solution, Siveco and Terra Nova enable customers to optimize their maintenance, cut down on direct and indirect costs and improve safety. The two partners’ excellent track record with leading international rail and infrastructure operators such as SNCF and Dalkia proves the robustness of the technology, while the experience already accumulated in the Chinese market by both companies ensures an in-depth understanding of Chinese realities.

Siveco and Terra Nova will showcase their mobile technology at the 2010 Metro China exhibition on May 19-21 in Shanghai.

Tags： infrastructure、mobile、VAPP、Terra Nova