Follow this Cascade scenario at a typical substation, then decide: can your Computerized Maintenance Management System do this?

Monday 4:45 p.m. – Steve Osborn fills out his timesheet, dumps the black goo from his coffee mug and plugs his FieldUnit into his company’s network (or dials in if he is doing job site reporting). He makes a couple of quick Communications menu selections, then hangs up his hat for the day.

Tuesday 1:15 a.m. – Cascade’s central BaseStation receives an update from Steve Osborn’s FieldUnit during nightly processing. Oil breaker #05-9732 has been bad news ever since day one, so when Cascade was set up, somebody had the foresight to bump its priority exponent up to 5. Even though Steve Osborn missed the significance of it during his inspection, that third "minor leak" notation triggers an automatically-generated maintenance order, #1998-2990014137 – but not on paper….

Tuesday 7:45 a.m. – Vicki Brown, substation engineer, selects the Waterton District in the Cascade Navigator as part of her daily routine. She clicks the Maintenance Order tab, clicks for a quick sort by priority, and – Whoa! With a priority of 776 for MxOrder #1998-2990014137 on that oil breaker in Substation 05, Vicki knows instantly that she needs to do a quick re-work of today’s schedule for Aaron Powers.

Tuesday 8:15 a.m. – Aaron Powers, maintenance technician, gets ready to head for Substation 05. He checks the Parts tab on his FieldUnit for a list of what he’ll need for MxOrder #1998-2990014137 before he goes. Wouldn’t you know it, the required parts are not available at his location, or at Service Center A, but there’s one in stock at another location nearby. With a quick stroke of the FieldUnit’s pen, Aaron allocates the parts to MxOrder #98-51123.

Tuesday 2:15 p.m. – Vicki Brown selects Substation 05 in the Waterton District in the Cascade Navigator and clicks the Forecast tab. With everything that’s been going on out there lately, she figures she’d better re-do her work load projections for next month before the meeting this afternoon.

Tuesday 3:30 p.m. – Vickie hands a Cascade results graph to Elgin Bigelow, her manager. Elgin Bigelow passes the graph to his manager. Heads nod. Vickie gets the resources she requested.

Tuesday 4:45 p.m – Aaron Powers finishes up with the replacement of the ram seal on that pesky oil breaker. Meanwhile, the customers in the Waterton District continue to function just as if nothing had ever happened – because, thanks to Cascade, from the customer’s perspective nothing did happen!