Monterey-Salinas Transit District (MST) operates a fleet of 176 buses, 40 support vehicles, four operations and maintenance facilities, three transit stations, three administrative buildings, and 1400+ bus stops. The agency has used Trapeze EAM since 2012. Prior to implementing EAM Mobile in 2020, MST staff would print out work orders from EAM and add them to a binder where technicians and maintenance crews would access them to do a job. Customer service requests would be sent via email, phone, and text.
With the paper-based approach, orders could be easily misplaced or lost, especially as staff needed to move between facilities. Customer service requests coming in from various channels were not always seen or responded to in a timely manner. Preventive Maintenance (PM) inspections were not always completed on time. Having maintenance crews come to one central location to pick up a paper work order meant delays in starting PMs and repairs at the beginning of a shift.
When MST Facilities went live with EAM Mobile, the agency worked with Trapeze to ensure that the system was configured to be easy to operate for technicians and maintenance staff in the field. MST has 400 repair task types in EAM and 15 total repair reasons for its facility assets. By creating Work Order Codes for PM inspections, repair groups and tasks, repair reasons, work classes, work accomplished codes, and inspection procedures, these codes have simplified the process. Staff using EAM mobile can easily pick a code from the list. This process has cut down significantly the time staff must search in EAM.
Once the work order is accessed by the technician or maintenance staff, EAM Mobile uses real-time labor capture so MST can easily track how long an individual repair or task takes to complete. Supervisors will receive emails for repair requests from across the agency and technicians are assigned to a work order when they first arrive for their shift, without losing time searching through a paper binder for the correct work order. The order is sent directly to the technician’s tablet via EAM Mobile, so they are ready to work from the moment they arrive. If a repair can’t be completed on the spot, staff can use EAM Mobile to generate a service request.
Preventive Maintenance (PM) inspection tasks can be accessed from the work order screen via EAM Mobile. Similar to a work order, a PM has a pre-defined checklist of what the technician needs to do for a specific asset/facility.
“EAM Mobile keeps it simple. I couldn’t be happier with how my team is doing stuff right now.”
A significant improvement is the way the PM checklists are configured for bus stop inspections. Each bus line is set up as an asset on which the bus stop inspections are performed. Each stop is a PM checklist item. Procedures are displayed on the technicians’ tablets for what is inspected at each stop. If there are items that cannot be taken care of during the inspection, a service request is generated.
All work activities are now recorded electronically in EAM, enabling MST Facilities to capture true costs with improved data elements for its assets. Technicians and maintenance staff now spend less time searching for items in the system and more time doing their jobs. MST is using EAM Mobile to work smarter.
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