The challenge
Maintenance ran on a shared spreadsheet, a radio channel, and whatever the shift lead remembered. Preventive maintenance slipped whenever a packaging line had a rush order, and nobody could say how far behind the plant actually was. Work requests arrived by phone or a sticky note on the supervisor's desk, so nothing was timestamped and nothing was searchable. When a pump seal failed on the third shift, the technician on call had to guess which spare bin held the right part. Corporate wanted a single backlog number across all four plants before the next budget cycle, and nobody could produce one without two weeks of manual reconciliation.
The approach
We specified the work order lifecycle first — request, triage, dispatch, evidence, close — before naming a single screen. The build was a mobile-first CMMS: technicians work from a native app that runs offline on the plant floor and syncs on Wi-Fi near the office, supervisors triage from a web console, and a nightly job reconciles parts consumption against the ERP so procurement sees real demand instead of guesses. Preventive maintenance schedules were rebuilt around actual asset criticality — pumps and PLCs on packaging lines first — instead of a generic annual calendar. A Grafana board gives each plant manager the same four numbers, refreshed hourly.
The outcome
“We used to find out we were behind when a line stopped. Now the backlog number is just there, every morning, the same for all four plants — and it's the number we actually trust in the budget meeting.”