OpenPlant
Plant Hire & Asset Management System
Product Overview
Open Plant arose out of a three year consultancy project that was undertaken with a major, Midlands based, Civil Engineering company. An investigation into their business processes and software systems highlighted a desperate need to manage the utilisation of their own plant, which amounted to some 1500 items. Coupled with this was the need to control the usage of hired plant and the tremendous costs that poor management of this was causing. An asset management system/register and a servicing/maintenance system was also required for the plant and for a fleet of over 100 vehicles.
Existing, Available Software
A trawl of available existing software illustrated a severe lack of solutions that were designed for the actual operational workforce. The business solution required that Site Agents needed to interface with the Plant Office, who could then in turn liaise directly with suppliers or allocate internal Plant. The vast majority of available software was licence controlled and had to be installed on every machine, which involved major costs and, of course, inhibited the integration of the supply chain.
Product Requirements
The Open Source solution was obvious. Design a system that could be used across the internet that would allow all parties in the supply chain to be able to speak to each other, either directly through the placing of an order, or indirectly via electronic data exchange. Anyone with internet access and appropriate security permissions, should be able to access the system.
Product Features
Open Plant provides an integrated Plant management, hiring and costing facility, together with asset management, vehicle servicing and testing. Whilst the system is designed to be accessible to anyone that requires access to it, an extensive permissions and security system ensures that a particular user will only be able to access appropriate information. For example, a Site Agent would normally only be able to order/off-hire plant, access information relating to orders that he/she had placed, including costs and communicate with the Plant Office and or suppliers.
An administrator would have complete access to all areas of the system, whilst an external supplier would only be able to access information relating to orders that they had supplied. Because the system has been written to use web based technologies, it is fully designed to integrate with other software packages, for example, accounts or stock control programs.
Developed for all environments
The adoption of Information Technology, in the Construction Industry, is extremely varied. Even the largest companies have struggled to successfully deploy effective solutions to the operational workforce. Open Plant is designed for 'men in hard hats'. For those companies that have provided Site Agents with laptops, wireless cards and/or braodband, then it works brilliantly. Howvever, even within companies there may well be some environments that a laptop or PDA just doesn't suit, for example, Second Stage works. Here a different solution is required that will still allow the technology to be used but in a user friendly way.
Pen and Paper
Advances in digital and mobile phone technologies have now made it possible for Site based employees to use a pre-printed paper form, in conjunction with a digital pen, to automatically submit forms and data via a mobile phone, just by ticking a box on a form. The form will then arrive automatically into Open Plant. This technology works so well that it has to be seen to be believed. It is ideal for those difficult environments where a laptop is not suitable or where a company has not yet deployed any Information technology, to Site based staff.
Please view the graphics below to see how Open Plant has been designed and how digital technology can interface with it.
Click on a graphic to reveal a larger image.
| 1. OpenPlant Process | 2. OpenPlant Digital Pen |
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