How a large European food manufacturer connected operators, machines, and data.

This company employs tens of thousands of people and operates production sites globally. Maintenance teams are responsible for production lines, utilities, and facility infrastructure. Their SAP Plant Maintenance (PM) system held the master data, but the shop floor needed to be connected. Technicians accessed SAP through desktop interfaces, and operators had no practical way to contribute to maintenance workflows from where they actually worked.

The company had used a mobile maintenance solution before. The supplier ended support for it, prompting the move to a replacement. That history made the team careful about the next commitment.

When they evaluated replacements, the requirements were clear:

Whatever came next had to work reliably from day one.

What changed.

With FastWork, technicians can pull up work orders, report time and materials, and check asset history directly from their phone or tablet. Data reaches SAP as work happens, not hours or days later. On some sites the app replaced some of the desktop terminals and created alternatives to paper-based processes.

The result is that savvy technicians stopped logging into SAP. They use FastWork while SAP gets the data it needs in the background. One senior maintenance technician, who has been using the app since the beginning, said: "I pretty much don't use anything else for the functionalities that are in the app."

Many new employees who joined after the rollout have never used SAP at all. "We have people here who have no idea how the SAP system works because they're using the phone and that's enough for them. They don't need to use anything else. And here we're talking craftsmen, blacksmiths, electricians."

The company's head of maintenance excellence described the shift from the management side: previously, technicians would do the work, walk back to a workshop, log on, and try to fill in information from memory. Now they can report at the point of work. As he put it: "They're at the line, they are able to fill in the information then and there."

Specific features have earned trust through daily use.

The spare parts search is one example. "Everybody loves this feature about scanning out spare parts from the stock. It works perfectly." At larger sites, where some facilities are big enough that technicians use bicycles to get around, searching for parts at the machine instead of walking to a terminal saves an estimated 10 to 20 minutes per reactive maintenance job.

The ability to attach photos to notifications is another popular feature. In a 24/7 production environment where the person who reported an issue may be off shift by the time someone arrives to fix it, a picture with the right context changes how fast work gets done. "You're able to attach a photo to what the problem is, that's a big help for the guys who are supposed to come and fix it."

Connecting data, machine, and operator.

The company's maintenance excellence strategy is built on three priorities: globally standardized and data-driven maintenance focused on reliability, cost transparency, and strong execution discipline between planned and reactive work.

They track 12 KPIs across their sites, including OEE, maintenance cost per tonne, schedule adherence, and the ratio of preventive to reactive work.

FastWork supports that strategy by connecting operators directly to the maintenance process. As the head of maintenance excellence described it: "We're capturing the data at the machine with the operator, you know, we're connecting the three together, data, machine, operator."

Operators were part of the plan from the beginning. When the company evaluated mobile solutions, the requirements explicitly defined two user types: production operators and maintenance technicians. Operators would create and close notifications, while technicians would handle the full work order lifecycle.

In practice, giving operators access to FastWork changed the dynamic. Instead of walking to a PC to log into SAP and report an issue, they can raise it live at the machine. The head of maintenance excellence saw that this creates a sense of ownership: "I think the operator feels a little bit more ownership because they're physically located at the machine

The improved data quality from the shop floor feeds directly into planning accuracy and compliance reporting. Planners work from current, complete information instead of reconciling paper records and chasing status updates.

This pattern, where operators detect and escalate issues directly from the shop floor, is what the maintenance industry calls operator-driven reliability. You can read our guide to operator-driven reliability for SAP maintenance teams for more on that topic.