| Test Case Title | TC 1.24 – Integrated Ticketing and Facility Management system, incident manaement, ticketing management |
| Goals | |
| Prerequisites |
The user is registered and logged in the system and has privileges to access to dashboards for ticketing management. Using a PC or Mobile with a web browser. A third party Maintenance and Facility Management System is accessible by Snap4City. |
| Expected successful result | The user can launch a new maintenance event and can see the evolution of the ticket management integrated in a Control Room dashboard |
For accidents and maintenance tickets, incident managment, ticketing management, we intend:
- any events that may lead to the intervention of some team in the city or in the industrial plant, they can be programmed or may occur for same reason.
- events for maintenance and/or for rescue teams.
- very simple events which can be solved by actions performed by a single person as well as complex activities involving several people and phases, uto to their formal closure.
Those kind of accidents/tickets are typically managed by Workflow systems that allow to define and manage:
- accident/ticket classification and coding
- workflow for each classified type of accident/ticket
- user interface for collecting data and metadata regarding the accident, and controlling its evolution in the several offices
- reports that can be produced for each phase of the accident evolution according to its workflow
- eventual metrics and KPI to assess the quality of the accident solution such as: time to react, time to perform, number of people involved, cost, cost of the material, distance, time taken to solve, etc.
As workflow management tool for maintenance/tickets and rescue we suggest to use OpenMaint, https://www.openmaint.org/en/home which is an open source we typically use on these cases. and we have successfully used for a number of large cases by us integrated with Snap4City and with our Business Intelligence tool for Predictive Maintenance, see for example: Scenario: High Level Control of Industrial Plant (industry 4.0)
Snap4City can be easily integrated to any other workflow management system solutions.
So that the integration of Snap4City with workflow management system can be very simple or sophisticated depending on your applications, but is can be performed by using IOT Applications that can also access to your plant /city data and context. The integration of Snap4city with workflow management system for managing tickets for maintenance/tickets or eventually for rescue teams, etc. can be easily performed by defining the interaction on Dashboards and the flows via the IOT Applications. The main functionalities from the IOT Application MicroServices are provided with a list of Special Blocks/node for Node-RED that allow you to:
- get list of active processes,
- access to the status of a process,
- access to the possible next states of a process,
- change the status or send of a message to change it,
- receive an event about the change of status of a given process.
- confirm the completion of an action from the operators to the system
- activate a new ticket and action into the workflow
Typically, the solutions for workflow management can produce reports regarding any elements of the workflow. The Workflow can be customized as well as the reports. Examples can be: incidents and events occurrence, taking in charge of them, planning the actions, acquisition of the action from a team, final actions performed and closure of the event.
Snap4City can interact with third party Maintenance and Facility Management Systems so that users can manage maintenance tickets and check their evolution directly via a Snap4City dashboard.
In the example below the openMaint tool by Tecnoteca (https://www.openmaint.org) is used for the management of maintenance tickets. openMaint is an open source application for the management of mobile assets (buildings, infrastructure, etc.), plants and technical devices, furniture, etc.
The interaction between Snap4City and the openMaint Facility Management System for the management of maintenance ticket is described in the following.
- The ticketing workflow
From the point of view of a user interface, an openMaint process is represented by a series of menu forms in which it is possible to insert different inputs representing the evolution of the maintenance ticket. While, from a point of view of the definition of the process, it is instead represented by a visual workflow.
Fig. Maintenance Ticket Requests Workflow schema.
In the example above:
- the green circle represents the beginning of the process
- the red circle represents the end of the process
- green blocks represent the menu forms
- yellow blocks represent the elements for data processing.
- rhomboid-shaped blocks with the symbol of an X represent bifurcations.
The process described in the above workflow is divided in 6 phases represented by the green blocks in the previous figure. The phases are: 1) The opening of the ticket with the request of maintenance; 2) the phase of check of components necessary to proceed with the work; 3) the assignment of the work to a maintenance team; 4) the phase in which the team confirm that started the maintenance work, specifying also the means of transport used; 5) the confirmation of the execution of the work in which the team can decide to: 6) confirm that the event has been successfully solved; simply abort the event; or to start a new request since a different problem to be solved has been identified.
The openMaint user interface is divided into three parts. The column on the left side shows the Navigation menu (1) with a list of tables, the process to start the maintenance request, and the different reports available. Each table represents the inventory of a specific part, i.e. the list of components, the list of plants, the teams, the vehicles, etc. These tables are used during the different phases of the maintenance request management.
In the upper part there is a table (2) with the list of individual instances of the process, each row represents a maintenance ticket, while the lower part (3) is formed by a form in which different parameters have to be inserted by the user and are the input of the process.
- Launch and manage a maintenance process
Each phase of the process is identified in the Actual instance phase box on the top right of the bottom part (see next figure) and have different input parameters.
At the top left of the openMaint screen, there is the button [+] Start Maintenance Request that allows to create a new maintenance ticket.
In the lower section of the screen there are buttons that are activated during the creation of an instance of the process.
- The "Save" button is used to save the instance in its current state.
- The "Advance" button is used to proceed the instance to the next state. After executing this command, it is not possible to return the instance to a previous state.
- The “Cancel” button close the process without saving any changes.
Thanks to the integration to the Snap4City platform, an operator on the field can start a new maintenance request by filling a specific online form using a tablet. To start the request, the operator has to insert a description of the problem, select the plant in which the problem is present from a drop down list, and click the Submit button. The form is the same available in the openMaint tool to start a new request.
After pressing the Submit button, the operator see the confirmation that the request has been correctly sent.
After the submission of the new ticket, the maintenance team receives the new request in the openMaint environment and is able to proceed with the process by clicking on the Edit activity button (1) or to abort the process by clicking the Abort Process button (2). On the top right of the bottom part, the status of the process is represented (3). Different possibilities of interaction can be set in openMaint according to the user role.