CMMS moves forward with 4Site V4.5, the next major edition of the popular maintenance, materials and accounting software package. This release includes developments in all program modules, as well as entirely new applications and information access facilities. You’ll reap even greater benefits from 4Site with the enhanced customization, ease of use, analysis, security and visibility features.

The Highlights:

Contractor Management

4Site Contractor Management ensures effective cost control of contractors who provide plant support for shutdowns, planned outages and regular maintenance. To allow both local and remote access to all contractor cost activities, from recording to paying time and materials charges, Contractor Management runs via Web browser.

4Site Mobile

Applications particularly suited to use in the field are now available to run on handheld computers such as Pocket PC’s. You can enter meter readings, work orders, time sheets, stores requests and stock counts as well as look up equipment, persons and organizational units.

Web Work Requests

The Web accessible Work Request application gives you the tools to enter requests for work via the Web. It’s a quick and easy way to register requests from any shop floor or field location with internet access, and then apply all of the standard 4Site work order functionality.

Asset Performance and Root Cause Analysis

Stoppages reduce asset performance – and of course your ROI. By identifying equipment operating below expectation and highlighting the causes of stoppages, 4Site produces Performance and Root Cause Analysis Reports that point the way to a plan of action for boosting asset performance. Built in customization tools and graphical presentation of data make it easy to use and easy to understand.

Equipment Work History Enhanced With Data Collection Templates

To assist in the collection of work history for equipment and help to ensure consistency, you can define a template that will give users fill in the blanks and check box functionality for entering history. For ultimate flexibility you can also enter free form history text in addition to the templated fields. PM Programs, Work Order, Scheduling and Spares applications all offer this new feature.

Automated Meter Readings Updates

This new application searches for meter reading import files, opens them and applies the meter readings, updating the reading values in the database, calculating usage trends and estimating future usage. This streamlined readings update ensures that preventive maintenance tasks are supported by the most current equipment data.

Equipment KPIs

4Site equipment KPIs measure equipment performance according to defined metrics that address operational, maintenance, reliability and safety factors contributing to the goals of reducing operating cost, increasing production hours and reducing emergency and corrective tasks. The information is graphed and analyzed to determine the success of processes put in place to achieve those goals and promote an asset performance culture throughout the organization.

Commitment Tracking

The Commitment Tracking module gives you the tools to ensure compliance with regulatory bodies for environmental standards and financial commitments. With these tools you can consistently meet mandated reporting schedules to organizations such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that monitor markets and support public safety.

FRx Software for Financial Reporting

With the integration to FRx Software and 4Site’s own Financial Report Writer, 4Site users will have a choice of financial reporting tools that create management and financial reports from the 4Site financial transaction database. Customized report formatting helps you create the reports determined by your business requirements.

Inspections Pro

4Site provides an import function from this condition monitoring system that gives operators the tools to complete inspection rounds quickly and accurately, collecting data with handheld devices for download to the Inspections Pro database. 4Site imports the information, making it available to the Preventive Maintenance application for condition-triggered tasks.

Customizing 4Site – Working the way you want

In keeping with a decades long commitment to users, 4Site V4.5 offers greater flexibility than ever with an extensive array of customization features that allow you to work the way you want. This overview provides a sampling of the new customization.

Optional creation of a new task when a current task is still open has been extended to conditional and date range triggers.

Depending on stock type and company, optionally disallow changes to stock price for repairable spares that are returning to inventory or being scrapped.

Choose the issue/pick price or the repair purchase order price as the default price for spares returning to stores.

Choose whether to update a stock item when returning a spare and changing the price.

Customize default lead-time and delivery date based on system codes.

Changes in the Supplier Insurance Information Report and Letters give you additional flexibility in setting up information entries.

The optional grace period for work orders allows you to charge stores issues and quick picks against work orders closed to maintenance.

Choose whether to allow costing of time sheets to unscheduled work orders.

Security and Control

Information housed in your 4Site database is arguably one of your most important assets. Additional security features in the latest version of 4Site target keeping that data safe from accidental or malicious damage.

Choose whether purchase requisitions must be approved before becoming eligible for copying to a purchase order.

Review steps for document routes automatically direct documents to persons who must examine it.

Depending on the reorder approval type of stock items, you can restrict reorder approval to the designated approver who must be the currently logged in user.

Restrict persons requesting a purchase requisition, work request, quick pick or stores request to those existing in the 4Site persons database.

Restrict reopening work order to the person who closed it.

Ease of Use

Making 4Site even easier to use not only increases productivity, it improves accuracy of data entry and all other activities. This version of 4Site builds on that tradition to lighten your workload whether you are an expert or novice user.

Easily copy equipment and project attachments to a work order from associated equipment or projects.

Printing windows for easy reference extends to Work Order Lookup, Detail Costs for Work Order and Detail Committed/Actual Costs on Tasks, View Activity, Account Summary and Account Transactions, Stock cost details and Material Service Lookup windows.

Oracle users will be able to take advantage of the import and export functions between 4Site Scheduling and Microsoft Project.

Copy any work order, including any selection of tasks and resources, to a new or existing work order.

Direct export / import functionality has been added for supplier bids in Excel.

Print purchase requisitions directly from the 4Site Control Center mail list.

Visibility

Increasing visibility of your data streamlines activities by eliminating time wasted looking for related information. 4Site V4.5 has added important details to many lookup lists and other windows so that you won’t have to go any further to find out what you need to know. Many reports have also been updated to show additional data. Here are just a small number of these changes:

Related purchase and stores request numbers are displayed on work orders.

Supervisors of organizational units have been added to the organization tree.

Work order history, equipment model #, serial #, and manufacturer can be added to your printed work orders.

When a mail message regarding a spare cannot be sent, an expanded explanation identifies the source of the problem, displays relevant information and suggests a course of action.

Currency conversion notification has been added to the purchase order header.

Warnings have been added for copying a purchase order line with a receiving allowance, for supplier currency changes and for the entry of vouchers greater than one year old.

Expanded data collection and Access

4Site has again expanded its data collection and made the data more easily available to authorized users. The following list includes some of these new features:

Custom work order flags for additional conditions or requirements.

Easy conversion of stock items to consignment (and back).

Attachments for bid requests.

Cancellation reasons added to Web Purchase Requests.

Backordered quantities added to the reorder request list.

Vacation routing added to Web Purchase Requests.

Counting unlimited items allowed on a count sheet.

New Voucher Query application.

Work order numbers and tasks displayed with labor availability and requirements.

Print tags for defective equipment.

Reporting

New and updated reports provide you with the quality data and analysis that transform your database into a rich source of information to enable fact-based decision support.

The new PM Compliance Report lists PM Work Orders tasks with trigger dates, completed dates and calculated days to complete. It also calculates the monthly average of the days to complete and charts those values.

Work Order Report includes purchase requisition lines created from purchase resources on the work order and stores request lines that have been created from stores resources.

Upcoming Tasks Report includes stores, purchase and labor resources required for each PM task.

Printed purchase orders can include a foreign currency indicator if the purchase order and organization currency differ. Terms and conditions as well as the Return Goods Authorization number are now available for addition to printed credit purchase orders.

The Purchase Requisition Report displays purchase order lines created for each line on the purchase requisition.

The Shutdown Report has been expanded to include closed purchase orders having custom entry shutdown dates within the date range of the report.

The Inventory Counting Variance Report has been expanded to include stock price and unit of measure, book amount, actual amount and variance amount.

The new Self Assessed Tax Report, lists issues for which tax is required, the account charged, the amount of the issue and the tax owed for each item.

The new Cost Center Report details costs collected by a 4Site maintenance cost center for a given date range.

Material Receipt Reports now indicate back orders waiting.