Overview
For a great many companies in this region, the equipment they sold is a bigger business than the sale was. Chillers, generators, medical devices, lifts, kitchen lines, production machinery — somebody signed a contract to look after them, and that contract is a schedule of visits, a stock of spare parts and a stream of invoices for years.
That business is usually run on a spreadsheet of service dates and a technician’s memory. Nama has a complete maintenance suite for it, with its own licence, and it is the part of this product least known to the people who need it most.
The machine is the spine
Every screen in the suite names a machine: the serial-numbered unit installed at a customer’s site, with its model, its location — plant room on the roof, basement equipment room — its warranty dates, and the customer it belongs to. Contracts cover machines. Work plans schedule visits per machine. Orders are executed on machines. Invoices bill the work done on machines.
Machine files can be generated from the sales order that sold the equipment, so the register starts populated rather than being typed in later from delivery notes.
The contract answers four questions at once
A maintenance contract says which machines are covered, how often each one is visited, what has been pre-paid, and how the customer pays. From it, a button generates the work plans — one per visit group, twelve of them for a monthly cycle — and each work plan generates the maintenance orders that the technicians will actually carry out.
That two-press chain is worth being precise about, because it is the difference between a system that plans work and one that pretends to: the plan is generated deliberately, and a person can look at twelve months of scheduled visits before they exist as orders.
Unplanned work joins the same stream. A customer rings about a fault and it becomes a maintenance notice, which becomes an order — as does a plain maintenance order request. Whether the visit was scheduled or called in, it ends up in the same place.
Doing the work, and billing it
An order produces an execution per machine line: what was done, by whom, and what was used. From the order or its executions, a maintenance invoice is created — and saving it does two things by itself: it raises the stock issue for the parts consumed and it posts the accounting entry. A maintenance invoice return reverses both.
An installation order can generate the warranty contract that follows it, so the obligation created by an installation exists as a record rather than as a note in a file.
Alongside all of that, an estimation prices a job before it is approved, a maintenance visit records a visit against the contract’s visit counter, and a maintenance plan stamps technician, route and planned date onto a set of notices.
Two things to know before you plan around it
Sites, not machines? There is a parallel suite — the same machinery aimed at a serviced site rather than a piece of equipment, under its own separate licence. If you maintain branches, premises or installations rather than serial-numbered units, that is the one to look at.
This is not the support desk. The equipment-maintenance suite and the CRM support desk share a menu and nothing else: a trouble ticket cannot be raised against a maintained machine, and each half keeps its own contracts and its own warranty register. A call about a chiller you maintain becomes a maintenance notice, not a ticket. Choose the half your business actually runs on.
And it is not the car workshop. Vehicle service, dealership job orders, parts and gate passes are a different module again, covered on the automotive industry page.
The machine file, contracts, work plans, orders, executions and invoicing are documented in the maintenance cycle.
