I am trying to put together plan for Systems Implementation for a new charity hospital in Tanzania. I am presently testing ERPNext as a vehicle for HR/Payroll and accounts and notice it comes with a Maintenance Module. A brief look at this seems to show some basic functionality but rather slanted to a service company maintaining equipment on a customers premises.
Can anyone give me viewpoint on the direction of development of functionality in this area? At the top of our list would be the tracking of reliability data, the recording of test results and the handling of fault reports and the associated repair work.
I understand that this functionality is not there, but the facility/business requirement that I mention is something that all manufacturing companies and many others with more than a trivial amount of fixed assets would require and so I was looking for a view on whether/when such a need would be addressed by the common core of ERPNext.
If there is enough demand by the community, I am sure the ERPNext team would address it. You could start a bounty for it to see how much interest is there for such a requirement.
Resurrecting this topic since this is something I’m going to working on over the next couple of months. ERPNext has the basic building blocks for this type of (CMMS / EAM / PM) system but co-mingling doctypes is not very desirable - CMMS should be its own module.
The basic Doctypes, exclusive to the CMMS module would be something like
Work Requests (similar to IT tickets requesting work/support…not all become work order)
Work Orders (accepted work requests, or directly created work orders)
Work Scheduler (crontab style scheduler which will fire off pre-configured recurring work orders at intervals)
Assets (all of the equipment being maintained by this module)
Components (components may belong to Asset, or thought of like a sub-asset)
Locations (where are your assets?)
Tools (in some cases there are specialized tools to use on specific assets)
Parts & Supplies (stockable consumables required for maintaining / fixing assets)
This is just high level and off the top of my head.
So, I belive that work on a module that resolve the integration between every active part in the system, will be much more easily and faster than re-doing things from zero.
Hey Max, thanks for the reply. Yes, as I learn ERPNext more I see a lot of the pieces are there. Some things like existing “Maintenance Scheduler” are not quite what I mean… using existing ERPNext terms/doctypes, an automatic “issue” creator if this existed, would be closer.
ERPNext idea of maintenance/schedule/pm seems based around concept that external suppliers will be performing the work 100% of time. In our case, and probably case of OP of this thread years ago, it is our internal team who is doing planned and unplanned break/fix work around the site most of the time. The “Work Order” in this case is closer to “Issue” doctype than “Mainteance Visit” but neither is correct enough to use as a CMMS style Work Order. The system is closer to an “IT HELPDESK” I suppose.
Based on the information from @max_morais_dmm and some poking around, I think we’re going to give moving our CMMS workflows over to ERPNEXT a try. There’s a lot of things that ERPNEXT does very well, that our existing system either doesn’t do, or does poorly. The support base here is also superior IMO. I’ll try to track and link any related issues or questions in this thread.
@max_morais_dmm maybe I am wrong, but at first glance “Maintenance Visit” appears to be created with concept of the ERP owner (us) being a manufacturer of an item (i.e. refridgerator) and we are using the Maintenance Visit doctype to track visits to our customers/clients.
Where as, in this case, we have a bunch of equipment on site (“Assets” linked to “locations” on site) that we perform regular maintenace on.
In our case the “Work Order” fields we have that would port to ERPNext would be something like:
Work Order # (naming series)
Asset (linked asset)
Location (pulled from linked asset.location)
Status
Description
user last modified
user responsible to complete
Parts required (list / table)
Tools required (list / table)
Work Order Type
Work Order Priority
General Notes (text area)
Actions Taken the resolve / resolution (text area)
Problem identified (text area)
Work order Created (datetime)
Work order DUE DATE (datetime)
Work order Completed Date (datetime)
Work order CLOSED date (datetime)
I guess important bit here is that I will need to add many fields to “Maintenance Visit” or perhaps just create a new “Work Order” Doctype that we can track.
The “work order” will be a submitable doctype with workflows anyway. Not sure if “Maintenance Visit” is or intended to be. In our case the work order is completed by a technician, and reviewed by their manager. Once manager is approving the content, it can go to a “Submitted” (Closed) status.