Customers
Bigfoot CMMS Flexibility Eases Transition from Paper to Computer
As a leading provider of paper forms, Moore/Wallace Business Forms is dedicated to making record-keeping painless for its customers. For years, their custom, in-house, paper work order system served them well. Bigfoot CMMS was able to seamlessly transition from a manual/paper-based system to the computer.
One way that they saved time was with numerical codes detailing the cause of a problem. Thirty codes, including "worn - normal wear" and "planned maintenance", provided the level of specificity management desired. What happened to correct the problem was called an "action code". There were also about forty action codes; these, however, were alphabetical. That way, one could always distinguish a cause from an action. For new employees, the two code lists were printed on the back of the paper work order form.
Bigfoot facilitates the use of short phrases (or codes) for problem and cause by providing user-editable drop lists, but action taken has a multi--line text box devoted to it. "Cause" is seen as the reason something happened, and "problem" is seen as a description of that problem. It was obvious to management that Bigfoot could be fine-tuned to accommodate the present coding system. As a result, some of the old causes were seen to be descriptions of problems.
The solution in Bigfoot was to use a custom field in the work order screen to display the action codes (in addition to the text box already provided). Mike Meyer, the Maintenance Project Manager, was pleased to learn that this revision was not a billable modification; these user-modifiable fields are provided as a courtesy, not a profit center.
Data entry into the renamed custom field was a breeze and in no time they had all their action codes set up to complement the problem and cause codes that had already been entered.
This exercise demonstrated to Moore how easy it is for a user to re-name a field on a screen. The Bigfoot staff provided a way for Moore management to introduce a new system which had an old, familiar look to it.
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