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Tero Software is a private company that was originally founded as a

consulting firm in 1979 with the aim of teaching organizations about

preventative maintenance strategies and how to automate them through

the use of computerized maintenance systems. In the mid-1990s, Tero

began delivering its own Web-based request management system, which

helped users deal with in-coming phone, fax, e-mail, and paper work

requests. In 1997, based on the success of its first Web foray, it

released its own Web-based maintenance management system, Web Work.

Tero's systems now help clients manage maintenance facilities, fleet,

and plant equipment. The company is headquartered in Coquitlam,

British Columbia (Canada).

Business Background

Tero is a software development firm that also offers consulting

expertise. While the company originally focused its attention on

organizations in the forestry and mining industries, its current

solutions address the education, military, and government sectors, as

well as the property management and manufacturing industries. Tero's

solutions are primarily used by many small and medium businesses

(SMB), though the company is also gaining tier one customers that

appreciate its slimmer solution. Most of Tero's target clientele have

revenues of between $100 million (USD) to $500 million (USD). Tero

resellers are based throughout North America, India, the UK, South

Africa, Poland, Russia, Iran, and Asia.

Supporting the Customer

Tero's Web Work solution is available in an application service

provider (ASP) hosting model with twenty-four hour a day, seven day a

week support. However, some clients prefer to have their own on-site

installations, for which Tero provides customer-specific service

level agreements (SLA).

Web Work is a system system with robust work order management and

equipment history functionality. However, Tero is particularly proud

of its method for supporting data division. An organization may have

many facilities and each facility may have many plants in separate

data divisions. The Web Work solution allows clients to separate data

from these various plants, so that people at a given plant can view

only information related to their job functions, while maintaining

one database and a common naming convention. This system allows, for

example, a regional manager who runs four or five plants to get

reports on, and see data for, all those plants. Moreover, because

there is a parent/child relationship in the hierarchy going all the

way up to the head office, it is possible to view reports on

activities and costs from a national, regional, or local perspective.

Another of Web Work's strengths is its reporting functionality, which

demonstrates Tero's ease-of-use philosophy. Tero believes that

information technology (IT) personnel and analysts should not be the

only ones capable of producing reports. In fact, according to Tero

General Manager, Rob Saare, "By giving the report writing back into

the hands of the maintenance manager or the maintenance folks they

can now report on the littlest aspects or the largest aspects of

their jobs." Thus, Web Work's reporting functionality enables

maintenance personnel to readily create custom reports that

drill-down and detail the work they have actually done.

These strengths are the basis for a Tero success story involving the

Washington State Patrol (WSP), which runs the US State of

Washington's police department. The department is responsible for

maintaining approximately sixty buildings and facilities, as well as

overseeing inventory that includes a fleet of about 1,600 vehicles.

To complicate this, the WSP has several divisions, including a supply

division and an electronic services division, and had to deal with

the inefficiencies of maintaining separate databases for each

division. Tero helped solve this problem through a series of meetings

that got the divisions working as a team and that established that a

single database and a common naming convention would enable the whole

organization to work more efficiently.

In the year and a half since those meetings, the WSP has successfully

moved from maintaining separate databases to having only one

database. The WSP supply division uses Tero's purchasing module, and

collaborated with Tero to incorporate several new features. The

electronic services division is now able to manage all the

organization's radios and electronics. At long last, all the

divisions communicate with each other and follow the same business

practices.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges Tero faces is encouraging clients to

overcome maintenance practices that have been ingrained over time and

do not necessarily work as well as they could. Though many companies

assert that this is not an issue with their practices, Tero has often

found that it can refine and improve their practices once its

consulting arm has the buy-in of people within the organization. As

Rob Saare states, "We try to teach people that it's all about people,

process, and tools. The software is merely a tool, it's a means to an

end, a data-repository if you will. The process: if you follow the

methodology in the software you inherently have immediately success."

The Future

The next important projects on Tero's roadmap include many interface

improvements. Since Tero has built its product on Microsoft

technology, it will take advantage of .NET and extensible markup

language (XML) to provide drag-and-drop functionality, more user

customization, and more user-defined screens and graphical user

interfaces (GUI).

Tero also hopes to expand the applicability of its solutions, as it

is seeing more interest in the area of IT asset management (ITAM).

Tero has noted that IT assets can be maintained in the same way as

facilities, fleet, and inventory, and so it is letting customers know

that they can run all maintenance and asset management activities on

one package.



SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/the-tec-quick-c

ase-for-tero-software-18384/