Plant Services - November 2007 - (Page 31)

ASSET MANAGER Who are you going to call? Take advantage of the help features in your CMMS A good CMMS skill set minimizes the importance of for easier reference. a user-friendly help feature. But when attempting Menus and function/hot key help: Look for a CMMS anything out of the ordinary, there’s nothing like package that provides help for every menu item, function sophisticated on-screen help to minimize frustration and key and hot key (e.g. F3, Ctrl-A, Alt-F7). This assists in errors. Comprehensive help often is associated with trainnavigating more efficiently. ing newbies or helping users explore new functionality. Procedural help: The how-to or procedural help requires However, software offers improved learning and productivconsiderable thought and work for the CMMS designer. ity aids, all under the umbrella of “help.” Modern CMMS Accordingly, only the more sophisticated packages seem to packages even point out better ways to accomplish a task, have mastered it. Procedural help should provide quick, sufor introduce features that might be of use to ficient detail to determine how to complete a a struggling user. Help functions are useful range of tasks, such as closing a work order, when troubleshooting a problem or finding calibrating an instrument and generating a information efficiently and effectively. Thus, custom report. there’s an assortment of help features available Look for a CMMS Traditional help tools: Most traditional to CMMS users. help comes with tools that assist in locating, package that understanding and processing help informaprovides help Traditional help tion. Look for: for every menu It’s difficult to find a CMMS package that is • Table of contents (with hyperlinks) completely void of help functionality. Most • Index (with hyperlinks to each topic) item, function packages have, at a minimum, some tradi• Search capability (including wildcards) key and hot key tional features: • Screen shots (to show sample screens) Electronic manual: This help function is an • Examples (to understand explanations) electronic version of a paper-based user guide. • Embedded hyperlinks (to provide crossThis electronic manual might be launched as a references to additional detail, elsewhere PDF by using a function key or selecting “Help” on a menu. within help or on the Web) The quality and level of detail varies dramatically, but the • Customization capability (to add custom explanations) key differentiator is whether it’s context sensitive. If not, • Print facility (to produce a cheat sheet) the help screen opens to the same page, regardless of what screen or field the user happens to be using. Advanced help Screen-level help: Instead of, or in addition to, an elecAs maintenance improved over the years, so did the CMMS tronic manual, many CMMS packages have context-sensihelp facility. Advanced features dramatically reduce the tive help geared to each screen. For example, pressing F1 learning curve for users and enhance productivity. Many of might activate a window that lists each of the fields on the these features include: current working screen, with a simple explanation of each. Jump: This feature allows you to jump back into the corField-specific help: A more advanced CMMS offers responding location within the application, as opposed to context-sensitive, field-specific help, which allows users to the original point of entry into help. access detailed information about a given field. Perhaps keyBubble help: Hovering over an icon, field label, menu ing F1 while your cursor is on a field will open a window item or hyperlink brings up a short explanation in a comthat provides an explanation of its function. Some vendors ment “bubble” next to the cursor. have a less sophisticated means of providing this functionalEmbedded help panes: Similar to bubble help with the ity – they simply reproduce the screen-level help, but with exception that the short explanation always appears in the the specific field in question moved to the top of the screen same location, rather than next to the cursor, perhaps in a November 2007 www.PLANTSERVICES.com 31 http://www.plantservices.com/voices/asset_manager.html http://www.PLANTSERVICES.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Plant Services - November 2007

Plant Services - November 2007 Contents New Tools Letters Let Us Know Where to Put the Gas Up and Running How are you Fighting Crisis? What Works Why is the Best Practice Transfer so Hard? Who are you Going to Call? Chained to Power Mobile Mindset Making Money in the Lube Lab Grabbing a Moving Target Bagging the BTUs Keeping Mellow Preserving Health and Safety The Power of Reliability Excellence

Plant Services - November 2007

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