We are considering use of the MWO (Mobile Work Order) processing for our Maintenance Engineers. We’d like to install the app on their phones. But first we would like to find out if it's used by other companies and if this is a reliable solution. Has anyone used MWO? Has it proved reliable? We use IFS9 and have about 50 Maintenance Engineers who work at our plants so they'd be connecting via WiFi from their phones. We have fairly extensive knowledge of IFS and use it quite widely.
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Hi
for Apps9 there is no specific Maintenance Engineer mobile app (which we do have for Apps 10), however you can setup mWO to be either customer centric (more focus on addresses and customer details) or asset centric (more focus on the object).
We have quite a large number of customers using it globally. The latest release is Upd16, which means it’s a fairly mature product.
Hi
considering the use of the mWO, we have some experience on IFS App 10. We have installed the apk Mobile Work Order 4.4.0 on the tablets in order to perform inspection round (for operation purpose) and to complete the maintenance assignment (for the maintenance purpose).
The application is wide fine, but since the go-live of our new system, we’ve experienced some issues with that:
- Long time to first initialisation of the tablet, due to the number of object to synchronise (equipments, spares, test point and measurements, documents, etc)
- mWO crashing when the task of your assignment exceed 35 to 40 work task steps
- Synchronization of the status between the mWO and IFS Enterprise Explorer when you return the assisgment from your mWO.
All this issues was raised to the IFS support and they are working to fix all these issues. However, It’s a real great experience to use the Mobile work Order and I encourage you to use it for more mobility of your maintenance team.
mWo in APPS9 works well. I implemented it for a maintenance group spread across 7 states. Some users were disconnected most of the day.
We did a lot of testing and process improvement upfront so the transition was smooth.
I’d agree with Nelson though great experience. APPS 10 framework, is great but needs some improves on the apps and sync.
We are using MWO in Apps 10 and generally unhappy with it. When it works its okay, however:
- App is unreliable and randomly crashes.
- Features just randomly disappear with app updates - we’ve got one case for a critical feature that disappeared that’s been open a couple months with IFS support that is moving at a glacial pace.
- The synchronisation function that you have to do is unreliable and often takes multiple attempts before it succeeds, and is generally very slow.
- The app doesn’t support iOS dark mode (its unusable in dark mode) but IFS support don’t think its a problem.
- The whole “transfer to mobile” concept, while I understand why it exists, causes us far, far more headaches than it solves and does not work well in a shift environment. We’d much prefer it just talks direct to the server and downloads a cache in the background as required like other “normal” apps.
- The MWO app is one of the biggest sources of frustrations and IT support calls from our maintenance team, and there’s basically nothing we can do to help them.
The app does work better on Android than iOS however we’re an iOS organisation for many reasons and don’t plan to change to Android.
We are using MWO in Apps 10 and generally unhappy with it. When it works its okay, however:
- App is unreliable and randomly crashes.
- Features just randomly disappear with app updates - we’ve got one case for a critical feature that disappeared that’s been open a couple months with IFS support that is moving at a glacial pace.
- The synchronisation function that you have to do is unreliable and often takes multiple attempts before it succeeds, and is generally very slow.
- The app doesn’t support iOS dark mode (its unusable in dark mode) but IFS support don’t think its a problem.
- The whole “transfer to mobile” concept, while I understand why it exists, causes us far, far more headaches than it solves and does not work well in a shift environment. We’d much prefer it just talks direct to the server and downloads a cache in the background as required like other “normal” apps.
- The MWO app is one of the biggest sources of frustrations and IT support calls from our maintenance team, and there’s basically nothing we can do to help them.
The app does work better on Android than iOS however we’re an iOS organisation for many reasons and don’t plan to change to Android.
Are you guys using mWO for Apps 10 or Aurena Native? Personally I’ve found Aurena Native (IFS MWO Maintenance 10 / IFS MWO Service 10 from the app stores) a lot more stable, faster and that it works the same on all three platforms (Android, iOS, Windows). Not saying it’s perfect though and humble about the fact that I don’t use it in a production environment.
We’ve also raised dark mode being an issue internally and I believe for Upd9, it will at least not be completely unusable, but probably not support dark mode. Instead it will just ignore dark mode when you run the app. Longer term we’ll push to get this solved!
What’s the issue with ‘Transfer to mobile’? Are you aware of the scheduled task that automatically performs the transfer process? It’s called Transfer Work Assignments to Mobile.
Hey
Yeah some way to fix the dark mode even if just ignoring it would be great - at least then the app is usable.
With the Transfer to Mobile process, its more around the fact that the process exists in the first place. I understand why it exists (so crew can work on tasks when they’ve got no connectivity) but some of the challenges it creates for us are:
- We are a shift environment, so if someone is half way through a task and forgets to return it before leaving for the day there’s no way for the next worker to pick it up and continue it.
- If the worker does return it then the planner has to re-send it to the next worker(s) until the task is done if it runs over multiple shifts (some of our tasks do). I think I saw a new feature in Update 8 which allows them to return straight to the pool which would reduce much of the inconvenience here though.
- Sometimes the Return has issues due to data conflicts e.g. if the planners have made changes to the tasks on the WO while the task was being worked on
- If the planner has to “pull back” a task e.g. a worker goes home sick part way through a job and didn’t return it, its difficult for the planner to pull it back to reassign it to someone else (can cancel the assignment, but that’s not a clean solution IMO).
- The initialize/sync process is a challenge as many of our maintenance crews are very good at their jobs but not great at computing and often forget they have to sync/init and as above, the syncs are very flakey at best and cause a great deal of confusion and frustration.
The ideal way for the app to work would be to just load assigned tasks directly from the server and then cache it - and perhaps use a background process or Lazy Loading so it doesn’t lock up the whole app. Perhaps an option for the worker to “download offline” if they wanted to but should still even then have a cached copy of the task which just syncs back when it has connectivity - similar to say Runkeeper (running tracking app) or even an email app really.
Hey
Yeah some way to fix the dark mode even if just ignoring it would be great - at least then the app is usable.
With the Transfer to Mobile process, its more around the fact that the process exists in the first place. I understand why it exists (so crew can work on tasks when they’ve got no connectivity) but some of the challenges it creates for us are:
- We are a shift environment, so if someone is half way through a task and forgets to return it before leaving for the day there’s no way for the next worker to pick it up and continue it.
- If the worker does return it then the planner has to re-send it to the next worker(s) until the task is done if it runs over multiple shifts (some of our tasks do). I think I saw a new feature in Update 8 which allows them to return straight to the pool which would reduce much of the inconvenience here though.
- Sometimes the Return has issues due to data conflicts e.g. if the planners have made changes to the tasks on the WO while the task was being worked on
- If the planner has to “pull back” a task e.g. a worker goes home sick part way through a job and didn’t return it, its difficult for the planner to pull it back to reassign it to someone else (can cancel the assignment, but that’s not a clean solution IMO).
- The initialize/sync process is a challenge as many of our maintenance crews are very good at their jobs but not great at computing and often forget they have to sync/init and as above, the syncs are very flakey at best and cause a great deal of confusion and frustration.
The ideal way for the app to work would be to just load assigned tasks directly from the server and then cache it - and perhaps use a background process or Lazy Loading so it doesn’t lock up the whole app. Perhaps an option for the worker to “download offline” if they wanted to but should still even then have a cached copy of the task which just syncs back when it has connectivity - similar to say Runkeeper (running tracking app) or even an email app really.
IFS MWO Maintenance 10 in the App Store is the Aurena Native app.
For the shift handovers, I don’t think there’s a great solution at the moment. If the worker did report ‘Incomplete’ and entered ‘Remaining hours to complete work’, you could likely create an event that automatically transferred a new pool task with the remaining time left on it. If they don’t it’s trickier, because who really knows they have left? Do you know ahead of time that a task will cross over shifts? If so you could possibly explore using multiple quantities in the resource demand and use ‘Pool Work’ to have it sit in the Pool until all are done.
As for sync, they should ideally not have to think about it as it should all happen in the background and initializing should be a rare occurrence. I agree though that it’s flaky and that you sometimes don’t understand where things get stuck.
I’m assuming offline access is a must? Otherwise, have you explored the Technician Portals?
It’s very important to get this kind of feedback from you and I’ve shared this thread with people within RnD as well! Keep it up!
Hi
No we don’t always know if a task will run over multiple shifts until it happens. Generally most tasks will be issued to a Pool, and then the workers will accept the task thereby creating the work assignment to themselves. The work our org does is very unpredictable time and work-wise, as it changes frequently at short notice as the weather blows or other more urgent works come up etc. so we can’t really plan to get around the multi-shifts.
I did discover the “Pool-Keep” option today when transferring to mobile which won’t fix the issues entirely but may reduce some of the frustration frequency.
As for sync and initializing we seem to have to do it fairly often and tasks randomly but often enough won’t come through until after a manual sync/init.
Offline access is not a must. We do have non-connected areas but most areas of our organisation have either Wi-Fi or 4G access (the iPads are all 4G enabled). Tell me more about these “technician portals” though 
Hi
No we don’t always know if a task will run over multiple shifts until it happens. Generally most tasks will be issued to a Pool, and then the workers will accept the task thereby creating the work assignment to themselves. The work our org does is very unpredictable time and work-wise, as it changes frequently at short notice as the weather blows or other more urgent works come up etc. so we can’t really plan to get around the multi-shifts.
I did discover the “Pool-Keep” option today when transferring to mobile which won’t fix the issues entirely but may reduce some of the frustration frequency.
As for sync and initializing we seem to have to do it fairly often and tasks randomly but often enough won’t come through until after a manual sync/init.
Offline access is not a must. We do have non-connected areas but most areas of our organisation have either Wi-Fi or 4G access (the iPads are all 4G enabled). Tell me more about these “technician portals” though
Technician Portals are online and built to do the same thing as mWO, but in Aurena. There is one for Maintenance and one for Service and they support workflows, surveys etc. just as Aurena does.
Have a look at this post here, https://community.ifs.com/assets-enterprise-service-and-assets-management-44/maintenance-technician-aurena-544. You should have access to them in your environment under ‘Technician Portals’ in the navigator. That’d remove your issues with sync.
Hi
Yes we have a subset of crew using the tech portal, with the rest of the maintenance crew about to move onto them (their new iPads just arrived).
We’re on Apps 10 u15 which is a bit old and is a bit buggy with its own issues but its significantly less garbage than the Aurena native apps. It’s not amazing but it is okay.
I cannot understate how offensively and maddeningly and shockingly badly built, un-QA’d, and unreliable the Aurena native mobile apps are and IFS’s responses to us and indifference about just how bad it is when raised the issues with them (outside of this forum) with solid hard log data to prove it were equally as bad.
IFS (the company) have cost us tens of thousands of dollars in loss of productivity due to how bad the apps are. It would have been in the hundreds of thousands if we didn’t pull the plug on it as early as we did.
Hi All,
Do you experience issues with the MWS because of MWO? We are on Apps10 upd 18 and went live with MWO last year and it seems like our MWS issues have increased considerably. Most of the times it is stuck threads, and it begins with the MWO sync jobs ending up with warning “PlsqlapServer.ERRPING: No response from MWS server vMAIN]”.
Want to verify if this is something others have experienced or something only with our environment.
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