Bis Industries

Bis Industries Automates Workshop With Asset Inspections

Load-haul-dumps, face haulers, continuous miners. These underground mining machines do tough jobs in even tougher environments. A division of Bis Industries supplies underground mining equipment to the coal industry on Australia’s East Coast. It needs to ensure that the equipment the company supplies moves quickly through the inspection process so it can go from job site to job site without compromising performance or the customer experience.

Bis Industries is the leading provider of underground equipment services providing critical mining equipment to the resources industry. Each piece of equipment the Bis Industries Underground division hires to a mine site must go through a pre-hire inspection. Once the customer returns the equipment, Bis performs a post-hire inspection. The post-hire inspection is used to create a scope of work for an external workshop to complete tasks found in the inspection and to re-charge the hirer for any incurred damage. 

THE CHALLENGE

In the past, after completing the inspections, Bis personnel had to input the forms into a spreadsheet, upload photographs taken of the equipment during inspection and email this information to an external workshop to complete necessary maintenance and repairs. The workshop then priced the job. Only when Bis approved the priced scope of work and sent it back to the workshop did work commence on the asset. The external workshop would then update the scope of work as the job progressed and send it back with final costing.

Gathering information from these paper-based processes took time, slowing invoices by months. “The delay in this manual process was causing the damage that needed to be charged to customers to not happen for sometimes up to three months,” a representative for Bis Industries said.

Without a central database for asset maintenance history and information, Bis personnel, their workshops and their customers had limited visibility into the condition of assets and the scopes of work for their repair. In some cases, customers refused to pay for repairs based on how old the damage claims were.

THE SOLUTION

Bis Industries sought a solution that would eliminate manual processing so it could hire and maintain assets more quickly. The company chose Cloud Inventory® to create a mobile app to complete inspections with integration to Bis Industries’ JD Edwards back-end system. Cloud Inventory includes a rapid application development platform with drag-and-drop interface with reusable components to quickly design mobile apps.

Deployed on ruggedized tablets, the app allows inspectors to take pictures and easily answer questions—and record that information into the back-end system. Users can also create a scope of work through JDE at the time of customer sign-off on repairs. The app takes the same questions inspectors responded to in paper-based forms and combines them with model work orders to allow reporting over each asset’s maintenance history.

During the post-hire inspection, the user can see pre-hire responses and images within the app. “This allows the user to clearly see if the equipment has been damaged since it went to the customer site,” the Bis Industries representative said. “If the post-hire inspection is completed on-site, the customer has the ability to see on the tablet what is determined to be customer damage and sign off on the inspection.

THE RESULTS

Since deployment, the mobile app has streamlined asset maintenance. Now, Bis Industries mechanics, as well as suppliers and customers, can see and use information from the Cloud Inventory app.

“As there are no manual processes to input recorded data, personnel are able to spend time looking at machines now and resolving mechanical issues instead of sitting in front of a computer,” said the representative. “Admin personnel are no longer inputting into JDE from Excel as this occurs from the Cloud Inventory solution.”

By putting information in the hands of Bis Industries’ workers, our mobile app enables them to do their jobs faster and better. The representative for Bis Industries said, “the Cloud Inventory app enables us to compare before and after hire pictures and inspection details of assets to make resolving recharge issues more efficient.”

INDUSTRY

Mining Service Industry

“The Cloud Inventory solution enables us to compare before and after hire pictures and inspection details of assets to make resolving recharge issues more efficient.”

- Bis Industries Representative

ERP: JD Edwards EnterpriseOne

HIGHLIGHTS

• Rapid application development platform allows for the elimination of manual processing

• Mobile app streamlines completion and line of inspections

• Instant data availability increases productivity by decreasing personnel wait time