MaintALMA, a maintenance tool for ALMA, will be considerably developed during the next year. "We've been looking for a customer with whom we would develop a broader view for a distributed multiclientorganization", says Heikki Uusitalo from ALMAs product development.

Resourcing of maintenance personnel will be a part of MaintALMA, which means that MaintALMA will take notice of resource management and dispersion of resources between multiple clients.

From now on expenses can also be tracked with MaintALMA. ALMA offers tools which a client can use to define their own structure for expensenses on the level they wish to utilize it in ALMA. It is a good idea to carefully map event and expense types before beginning to track them with ALMA. Work hour tracker will be expanded to include also other expenses, not just work hours. Other expenses include labels such as: travel times to on-site, spare part expenses, preparation expensenses, etc.

New calendar feature can be utilized in a more versatile manner than before. The person carrying out maintenance can see his own as well as e.g. his teams planned work assignments. Work designer on the other hand has his own calendar from which he can see all allocated resources by area, by client or by teams. Work designer can assign work to maintainers directly from his calendar. There is no limit to calendar views--it is up to the clients imagination to define the ways by which he wants to visualize event based information.

MaintALMA calculates life cycle cost and the value of investment. Based on this information payback time for the client can be calculated, which makes it easier to make investment decisions.

"All in all, MaintALMA makes joint efforts visible to end-client, service provider and company management", Heikki Uusitalo summarizes.

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For more information please contact: ALMA Consulting Oy, Mr. Heikki Uusitalo, mobile +358 40 543 3561, e-mail heikki.uusitalo(AT)alma.fi
Alma Consulting Oy Ltd, Export Manager Mr. Niko Pahkala, mobile +358 40 357 31 94, e-mail niko.pahkala(at)alma.fi

ALMA® is a totally integrated engineering and knowledge management system for life-cycle handling of technical data, documentation, production line efficiency and maintenance management. ALMA® knowledge management systems are licensed to over 7 000 users among 300 companies in 46 countries. ALMA® was introduced to the market in 1986 and it is registered trade mark in 13 countries.

Alma Consulting Ltd. develop, market, deliver and maintain ALMA® knowledge management systems and related services for engineering, maintenance of technical data and events information. The company is well established as an expertise and resource network operation in deliveries, training and product development.