We get excited when we can share new releases of our software because it means improvements and added features that will help you work easier and smarter. With the latest update to Equipment360 2021.1, here are some of the highlights that you can benefit from today.
Making Asset Manager and Churn Chart Setups Easier
In the Equipment Types setup, we’ve added some additional fields to make it easier to make use of the Asset Management and Churn Chart reports. If you haven’t set up your expected lifetime years, and “hours/miles/kilometers” per year, you aren’t getting important information to these reports that will help you decide when it is best to repair or retire your equipment. Thankfully, your waiting has paid off!
You can now enter this setup at the equipment type level, and any piece in that group will automatically inherit that setup information. If you have already entered this information for some equipment under that group, you will be asked if you want to overwrite it or not. If any piece strays from the norm, it can be edited individually in Equipment Detail.
As a bonus, this also means that when you buy a new machine, whether you set it up in the system yourself, or you have a custom-automated import from accounting (DIS), that equipment will automatically have an inherited baseline for expected life.
A new feature, maintenance budget, is set up the same way, so you can set your expected lifetime maintenance budget and more easily keep an eye on both the hours and the sunk cost to decide when it is time to send it to auction.
The last tab for each work order will now contain an Analytics section that will show Equipment Utilzation, and it will reveal cost and budgetary numbers from Asset Management.
Delete Meters Used on Preventative (PM) Work Orders
We know meter maintenance can be a pain, and we’ve made several changes over the years to try to make it easier to find and address issues.
Since the initial release of Equipment360, the Hour Meter and Odometer Equipment Worksheets have been the fastest and easiest ways to review and update stale meters.
In 2019.1, we added the multi-select option to Equipment Details’ > Meter Tools > Edit Meters, so if you had a bad reading that turned into several bad entries, you could quickly select the bad meters and delete them in one go, instead of one by one. In 2021, we added the Meter Reading Exceptions report to the Reports menu, which will let you set a date range and highlight any suspicious meter readings, making it easier to find issues quickly.
And now, in 2021.1, we added the ability to delete or edit meters that have been used for a PM, which was previously verboten. If you delete a PM meter from the Edit Meters screen, the system will prompt you to open/edit the PM Work Order to fix the meter, so your maintenance schedule is still maintained. If you edit it, the system will just use that new meter as the PM reset point.
Telematics Integration Improvements
In the past year, on our Telematics site, we added Visibility Sets, to make it easier to hide machines from different users, like your foremen’s pickup trucks. In 2021.1, we added a similar feature to Equipment360’s Telematics Integration screen, where you can check a checkbox to hide the location of that piece. Equipment Detail will still show the meter and other information, but the map and location information will be empty. This will also apply to the upcoming 2021.2 version of Mobile Mechanic as well.
We have also added a view of the Telematics Utilization for the past 30 days in Equipment360. This will show the run time, idle time, and HeavyJob utilization for each piece of equipment.
We Added Features from Your Mechanics’ Wishlist
Speaking of our mechanics, we’ve made several tweaks to mobile since the overhaul earlier this year, many from direct feedback from mechanics in the field. We’ve added region and department filters to the equipment search, added the ability to see PM information in Equipment detail, added the ability to attach pictures to backlog items.
The 2021.2 release will have push notifications for Rejected Time Cards and New Work Order assignments, potentially negating the need to use the email/text notification that we added for New Work Orders previously. Dark mode will also be a bonus that we are sure will excite some of our users.
We hope these, and some of the other features we added will make your life easier, and the software easier to use and utilize. Many of them came from suggestions from our customers, so if you have something you would like to see, please share it in community.hcss.com!
If you need help with the update or have questions about the new features, our fleet support specialists can be reached at any time by phone, chat, or email.
