|
EBME
A new EBME provision is
a major feature of
Eclipse-fm® V4
|
|
 Welcome to our Eclipse-fm® HFC Conference Edition e-Newsletter
We hope we will be seeing you at the conference, which will be at the Kassam Stadium, Oxford, on 18 and 19 September.
We are on Stand B1, which is on the 1st floor.
We will be showing the next release, v4 of Eclipse-fm®, with the new EBME module in particular offering new functionality for managing maintenance that involves specialist technical needs. More on this below
We will also be covering Dynamic AI as a solution for live, web-based management reporting applicable to just about any data source likely to be in use within an NHS trust.
We will also have Trix Organizer, our new "Enterprise Level" Technical Drawings and Document Management system running with Eclipse-fm®. We covered Trix in our last newsletter so see here for details. The complete archiving of historic paper documents can be a very big job, and we offer a full service, covering initial assessment to arrive at an agreed archive structure, the physical scanning, and tagging of the resulting electronic files into the electronic archive. If you are considering making the move to electronic archiving of documents and drawings, come and talk to us.
Support and Hosting
Through our N3 connection to the national Connecting for Health Network we can provide fully approved connection for the purposes of on-line support and, in a growing number of cases, actual application hosting. Come and talk to us about how your Trusts’ N3 connection can provide maximum user and support advantages.
|
|
Eclipse-fm® v4 - EBME Module
Although initially designed for the specific needs of EBME, this new module has been developed to provide a flexible basis for a variety of types of equipment that need more information to be associated with each maintenance task
Taking EBME as a first "Template" for such, we expect to see coverage of other special maintenance needs, such as Vehicle Maintenance, emerge to meet those particular requirements. As with EBME, we will be looking to work with users with such specialist needs to develop such "templates" relatively quickly.
The EBME module will include
Safety Action Bulletin Alerting
Designed to provide for much more comprehensive, automated and audited handling of Safety Action Bulletins, these may be recorded against the particular equipment Model/Type to which they refer. Such action Bulletins will then be visible for all assets of that Model/ Type.
More pro-actively, and considerably easing the subsequent administrative task, the recording of an Action Bulletin will generate the tasks needed to meet the requirements detailed in the Action Bulletin. An individual task will be generated for each item of equipment affected, and a master Action Bulletin task is created that will remain in place until all the individual equipment instances have been completed.
This alerting will completely automate the responses needed to handle Action Bulletins, and will provide for definitive tracking of the work needed and long term proof of correct response.
PAT Testing Recording
Where relevant, a set of entry fields covering PAT testing data is available. These include the details of which testing machine was used, so that assets can be listed against the PAT tester used to carry out the test, allowing for monitoring of PAT test equipment performance, as well as the equipment tested.
Extended Equipment Categorisation
Classification by Equipment types - Dialysis machines, Defibrillators, ECG machines, etc has been added. The classifications are not pre-defined, but are are determined by you as users to your own needs.
This will enhance the process of searching for or listing assets, as these classifications are included in the filtering of searches and lists.
Loan Items
The existing Loan Item system has been extended, with the addition of a means of "importing" items as loans from other organisations or parts of the same organisation, or course. This ensures that such equipment remains visible to the maintenance/ servicing process, while always providing an up to date reference to where the equipment can be found (e.g. for maintenance) at any given time.
- The Loan Item facility will now be a key feature of EBME management
Specialised equipment is very often temporarily assigned to a location for a specific period, or acquired from elsewhere similarly. As well as providing clear identification of where the asset can be found - e.g. for maintenance purposes - the concept of an "Equipment Library" is supported by this extension.
Filtering of Areas of Interest
Particularly with EBME, but also applicable elsewhere in Eclipse-fm®, we have met requests to further limit visibility to only a particular focus of interest. This will make it much easier where Trusts have been combined, or one Trust carries out maintenance work for another, as happens very often in EBME maintenance work. You can specify to have visible only the data from a particular location, department, asset type etc. The filtering extends to other areas, such as Finance, Stock, Staff Qualifications and more.
Work Easier, work Better
As with our whole Eclipse-fm® philosophy, the Eclipse-fm® EBME module is designed to
- Make your work easier
- Define good practice
- Prove adherence to the principles of good practice - vital in the NHS, and especially so in this EBME field.
Back to top
|
Support & Hosting through N3
As should be familiar to most NHS Staff now, the NHS maintains its own private network, known as N3, and administered through Connecting for Health.
Normally, non NHS businesses are kept very firmly out of this network, for the obvious reason that it is handling much sensitive information. This means that most suppliers of Facilities Management software have difficulty in providing on-line support - at least where the provisions of Internet connection within the NHS are being adhered to.
We can support Eclipse-fm® on line, as we have a fully approved N3 connection. This means that we can
- Connect directly to your Eclipse-fm® installation while working with your users to solve a problem or providing advise on how to use the system.
- Carry out routine database maintenance to ensure that you have no "stray" records, or other database problems.
- Install or update Eclipse-fm® for you, checking that all is well before handing back control to you
- Actually operate the whole of your Eclipse-fm® system from our premises, eliminating any need for you, or your Trust technical staff to get involved in the technical side of supporting it.
Fully Authorised
Quite properly, we know that Trust IT staff are very wary of allowing connections from the outside world, but this really is a fully authorised connection, and we can give you chapter and verse on our authorisation - and what you will need to do to register our connection to you.
Support - The Benefit
Simply - we can provide a level of immediate support that would, without the on-line provision, at best result in the usual "OK, do this, tell me what happens, now do this, what happened then" dialogue, or at worst would need an expensive physical, in-person visit.
Hosting - The Benefit
A "hosted" installation implies single, server based installation of Eclipse-fm® that is accessed via Microsoft Terminal Services, as opposed to an installation on each user PC. We have become convinced that even if entirely run within the Trust, the benefits of responsiveness, lower bandwith usage and single point software updating make this the preferred way of running Eclipse-fm®.
From there, it is but a short step to realising that it doesn’t matter whether the server is local to the site, somewhere in the UK, or anywhere in the world for that matter - we have been doing some test hosting for a client in Texas recently, and the reaction is "It runs faster than on my laptop!"
If you have any thoughts about Eclipse-fm® performance, support, and/or hosting, come and talk to us at the show.
If you need any other application or website hosting that needs to be kept within the NHS private network, we may be able to offer a solution.
Talk to us at the HFC conference about on-line support for Eclipse-fm®, and anything to do with hosting services that need to be within the NHS private network.
Back to top
|
Training - & Data Conversion
We have found an ever increasing demand for Eclipse-fm®
training through the last few months, which has been very good news.
However, this has pointed up the fact that almost always there is a preliminary need for work to be done in transferring previous system data into Eclipse- fm® so that newly enthused trainees can put their skills to work.
Where the previous system is WIMS, this is not too big a challenge (though there are a surprising number of different definitions of "standard" WIMS data!), but where the Eclipse-fm® system is replacing other systems, more work needs to be done. Of great importance, this needs to be done before training takes place. In the absence of data imported from the old system working up a full set of Asset etc data is a big job, and not one that FM departments are staffed to undertake. It is also quicker for us to do it, as with our "inside knowledge" we can translate what the old system data means to Eclipse-fm® much more easily than you could.
What can be imported?
Virtually all FM systems have some concept of
- Assets
- PPM tasks (task templates)
- Budget Codes
These represent the core data needed to get started. These are not too difficult to import - though even here there are differences of course, which need to be planned for - is an Asset uniquely identified within the trust, or identified as "Asset at Location" (in which case what do you do with it if it moves location?) is a recent question we have had to resolve. It is this kind of issue that our experience, and ability to quickly create "tools" to help with the transfer, can let us do this much more expeditiously than will be the case for you.
What about History?
Everyone asks this, and very few ultimately find it worth while. With Eclipse-fm® being evolved from WIMS, transfer of WIMS task etc. history is feasible, but even then the commonest approach is to keep the old system available for reference. For other systems, the amount of analysis needed to discover how history records are organised is daunting, so we would usually recommend the "available but not in use" approach.
Another practical benefit is that if you are not transferring history, you have less of a need to face up to a "stop the old system, start the new one" deadline. Stopping the addition of new Assets, Task Templates or Budget codes, and allowing for a few days of possibly duplicate PPM task issuing is a very different proposition to stopping the old system for a day or two while data transfer takes place, then never being able to use it live again!
Data Import - in practice
Don’t plan to spend lots of your time on importing data. We can give you the tools to do it, but in reality, it is better to concentrate on learning how to use Eclipse-fm® which you will be using every day, rather than how to import data which is a one time effort.
We can look at the data available from the old system, determine what can be transferred, quote for the time needed, and get the import done with the minimum of downtime while it is being done.
Do it first
Don’t wait until your staff have been trained and are all fired up to use the new Eclipse-fm® system! At that point they will want to be doing something useful, not just typing in Asset details, or defining task templates
We need to work with you to plan data transfer to happen as close to the training sessions as possible.
Does this all make sense? Come and see us at the HFC Conference (Stand No B1) and talk about how we can get you from where you are now with your current FM System to the full "by the NHS for the NHS" Eclipse-fm® system.
Back to top
|
|
That’s all for now
Lots of new Eclipse-fm® features in the pipeline, come to the HFC Conference 18 - 19 September 2008, Oxford, to see for yourself!
 e-News from Eclipse- fm® is provided by Asckey Data Services Ltd  |
|
|
