The Entire World of Maintenance at your Fingertips

Mobile maintenance—conducting repair and servicing tasks via smartphones or tablets—offers numerous advantages. Technicians can access critical information on site, record material usage and measurement data, and document damages and their causes. Integration with inventory management systems for spare parts enables efficient processing of material reservations and withdrawals. This improves maintenance workflows, shortens response times, and increases overall productivity.

Mobile maintenance is a foundational technology that delivers cross-industry benefits by optimizing and adapting maintenance processes to specific use cases. Wherever maintenance is performed—be it expansive sites like wind farms or large industrial complexes such as BASF’s chemical plants spread over vast production areas—the advantages of mobile solutions come into play. Real-time data collection on site reduces time and travel effort, allowing for efficient planning and execution of related tasks. For example, during inventory checks, direct verification against stock prevents duplicate counts and eliminates the need for subsequent audits.

These mobile solutions provide maintenance personnel with anytime, anywhere access to all required information. This significantly reduces queries to supervisors or experts. Work orders, checklists, and fault reports can be created and processed directly on site, ensuring continuous and up-to-date documentation. The collected data can be analyzed in real time and shared with other maintenance staff. Furthermore, the high user-friendliness of the mobile interface enhances acceptance among technicians, leading to improved data quality and minimizing errors that commonly occur when transferring paper documents to digital systems.

Easy access to relevant information also simplifies onboarding of new technicians, reducing training time. Newcomers can retrieve tailored details such as work plans, threshold values, and drawings directly on their mobile devices. This enables less experienced staff to perform more complex tasks with the support of additional information, thereby boosting maintenance efficiency and helping companies save time and costs.

However, many mobile maintenance projects fail due to poor usability or security concerns. Insufficiently intuitive applications result in low acceptance and reduced efficiency. It is essential that solutions are self-explanatory, minimize unnecessary clicks, and are optimized for visualization on mobile devices. Additionally, mobile maintenance solutions must integrate seamlessly with existing system landscapes such as EAM (Enterprise Asset Management), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), or MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) to deliver full value.

SPIE’s Insight Mobile has been a proven solution in the market for nearly a decade. It combines classic mobile maintenance functions like fault reporting, work order management, and inventory control with innovative features such as augmented reality (AR) for maintenance, AI-powered spare parts search, voice-controlled checklists, robot fleet monitoring, AI-based inspection and computer vision, and an industrial data management platform.

While major EAM providers like IBM, SAP, or Hexagon offer highly customizable systems, SPIE experts note that these often provide only standardized mobile functionalities. As a result, EAM systems tend to be used primarily as planning tools rather than delivering value directly on the shop floor. Insight Mobile fills this gap by delivering critical system capabilities directly to technicians in the field—where maintenance work and value creation actually occur.

“With Insight Mobile, all maintenance processes can be managed end-to-end,” state the SPIE specialists. The platform covers order processing, inspections, inventory management, and fault reporting. Out-of-the-box templates can be customized, and additional applications can be quickly and cost-effectively implemented. The solution also supports maintenance-adjacent use cases such as Field Service Management and Turnaround and Shutdown Management.

“Insight Mobile is successfully used by numerous customers across various industries—from automotive and logistics to retail,” SPIE experts emphasize. “Wherever maintenance and servicing take place, Insight Mobile can deliver measurable benefits. Today, more than 15,000 users rely on Insight Mobile to streamline their maintenance operations.”