Real-time Equipment Data, Maintenance, and Uptime – Open Kitchen/SiteSage Integration with ServiceChannel
It’s amazing what you learn about your critical equipment when you get remote access to real-time performance data.
In thousands of Open Kitchen/SiteSage installations at small commercial facilities – mostly chain convenience stores, restaurants, and retailers – we have seen the incredible challenge facilities maintenance people face every day when managing a distributed network of HVAC, refrigeration, lighting, cooking equipment, etc. There is always equipment under-performing, equipment going down. Even with regular maintenance programs, equipment can fail. It’s just entropy.
We have shown that by providing facilities maintenance departments with real-time alerts and reports on critical equipment, we can help them more effectively manage this challenging array of equipment. We do this by informing them before equipment fails, and by illuminating why equipment has failed to enable a repair with a single truck roll, not multiple.
One of the bottlenecks in getting a failed piece of equipment back online quickly is the time it takes from when a problem is detected to when a technician is deployed to the site to repair the failure. This is where our partnership with ServiceChannel comes into play. We can now link automated equipment failure alerts from Open Kitchen/SiteSage directly to the ServiceChannel CMMS system, which then automatically creates a work ticket for the equipment to be repaired.
There are several benefits to this integration:
- The work ticket is created in “real-time” — as soon as the failure is detected
- No administrative action is required to create a new work ticket for the technician
- The ServiceChannel work ticket now links directly to data from Open Kitchen/SiteSage — making it far faster and easier for the tech to see the data at the root of the problem
Overall, the combination of Open Kitchen/SiteSage and ServiceChannel can speed the time to resolving an equipment problem — both because the work ticket is automatically generated as soon as the problem is detected and because it now contains a far richer data set, enabling the technician to diagnose the problem much faster and with greater precision.
We’ve recently integrated Open Kitchen/SiteSage with ServiceChannel at a large chain of convenience stores in the Southeast US. They are receiving Open Kitchen/SiteSage alerts from their walk-in refrigeration units, HVAC systems, and lighting automation systems, and automatically generating ServiceChannel work orders for repairs. While this particular customer may be ahead of their peers in linking real-time equipment alerting to their work ticketing system, we see so many compelling benefits to this integration that we expect many other organizations to follow.