Application section
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Application section contains all the views and tasks that normal users need in day to day usage of NorfelloCMMS.
Assets
Almost everythingin NorfelloCMMS is associated to assets in one way or another. For example reports and work orders are always connected to assets. This type of associations enables you to easily find information related to a piece of equipment or other property that you manage.
Assets are organized to a hierarchy called asset tree. The asset tree helps you navigate and control a large amounts of assets and the data associated to them. Defining the base structure of the asset tree is usually the first step you take when using NorfelloCMMS.
The structure of the asset tree depends on the things that you manage. If you are working in a company that manages estates around a city, you would probably create the structure based on the physical locations of the assets. On the other hand if you manage a big computer network with many computer systems and servers, you could organize the asset tree based on the layout of the network.
Each asset has three fields:
- Name: Short description for the asset. Names can include spaces
and other special characters.
- Examples: 'Main pump', 'File server'.
- Code: Identifier for the asset, must be unique among the sibling assets (assets that have the same parent).
Codes can only include upper-case letters (A – Z) and numbers from 0 to 9.
- Examples: 'P01', 'FS'
- Description: Longer description and other information for the asset. Description fields use a simple MarkupLanguage that enables you to include headers, lists and other elements in the description.
You can identify a specific asset in the asset tree by listing the codes of the assets that lay in the path from the root to the asset in question. Codes are combined with a hyphen. For example the full code for a 'Web server' (WWW) in a 'Server network' (DMZ), which is located in 'Example Company' (EC) is EC-DMZ-WWW. Full code for a 'Mail server' (SMTP) in the same network would be EC-DMZ-SMTP.
You can use the full codes to quickly find assets or to create links to assets in the description mark-up language. Because of their short length and simple form, full codes can easily be used to reference specific assets in SMS messages, emails etc.
Asset tree
Asset tree provides a simple way to navigate and select assets. You can bring up the asset tree by clicking on the 'Show asset tree', link which can be found at the top left corner of the page. Next to the 'Show asset tree' link is another link that show you the currently selected asset or branch of assets.
It works and looks like a file system tree found on many programs. You can select assets by clicking on the code and navigate the hierarchy by clicking on the plus and minus signs, which show and hide the sub-assets. You can also hide all sub-assets by clicking on the 'Collapse' link on the top of the tree. The 'Expand' link does the opposite by showing all the sub-assets.
There are two selection modes in the asset tree. In the first mode you can select single assets by clicking the code of the asset. The second mode is for selecting branches of assets. Branches are selected similar to single assets, by clicking on the code. The difference between single asset selection and branch selection is that in the branch mode all the sub-assets are included in the selection. You can change the selection mode by clicking on the 'Select branches' or 'Select assets' link.
Timeline
Timeline provides a historic view of the selected asset or branch of assets. It's a chronological list of events that have occurred in the asset or branch.
Timeline lists the following events:
- Report was created
- Report was modified
- Work order was created
- Work order was assigned to user
- User accepted a work order
- Work order was closed
- Work order was reopened
- File was attached to asset
Work orders
Work orders enable you to schedule jobs and assign personnel.
Usually there is a specific time window in which a job may be performed. There could be scheduled service breaks for machines that are in production use or some jobs could only be done during business hours. Sometimes the time window for a job is open from the other end. For example some jobs have to be completed before certain dead-line. You can specify the time window for a work order by setting a starting time and a deadline. Either one or both can also be left unspecified.
Time window for a work order might be longer than the time that the job actually takes to complete. For this reason you also set an estimated working time for work order. When work order is closed, you can specify the actual time that the job took to finish. Later you can compare the estimated times and actual times to improve your estimates and identify possible problems in your practices.
If the length of the time window is close to the estimated working time, the job can be considered critical because you can't start it late or spend more than the estimated time working on it. On the other hand, if the length of the time window is much longer than the estimated working time, you have more freedom on starting the job and you can exceed the estimated working time.
Downloading work orders
If you have uploaded a work order template in the 'Control' section, you can download work orders as OpenDocument files by clicking on the 'Download' link on the view page. When the work order's long description field contains links to reports, these reports are converted to OpenDocument files as well and packaged to a zip archive with the work order document. In this case, special sections are also created to the work order document that export the content of the report documents to the work order document. This enables you to easily print a work order and all reports associated to it.
Reports
Reports are one of the corner stones of NorfelloCMMS. Information from the customers and workers are collected through the reporting system, which is very flexible and can be customized easily.
Attached files
You can also attach arbitrary files to assets. This enables you to gather images, manuals, schematics and other information so that it can be found easily. Keeping the core documentation in the NorfelloCMMS helps information sharing as the files can be accessed from anywhere with a web browser.
Users
From the 'Users' menu you can search for other users and display information about them. You can also send messages to other users from the user information page.
You can edit your own contact information and change the language of the user interface from the 'My information' page. Changing the password is also done from this page.
