Software Aimed at Outcomes:
Designed for Practitioners, by Practitioners

In the Beginning

Our Enterprise Asset Management software has always been aimed at producing important outcomes for our customers because it was designed by our practitioners who were personally responsible for delivering those outcomes. Everyone in our company was focused on delivering results that far exceeded our costs so that our customers produced a significant and measurable ROI.  Today, our software customers get the benefit of these many years of practicing, learning, and improving that is built into our product. While we do have all of the common features found in typical asset management software, we also have other important features not found in other software packages that are not focused on the speed and cost reduction outcomes we’ve been focused on for over 20 years.

The Outcomes We’ve Helped Customers Produce

Many of the customer teams we’ve worked with have won management awards for the previously unbelievable results they produced.  We discussed our approach at the recent Aerospace and Defense Summit and it is well represented in our case studies.

• Reducing capital spend up to 75%
• Reducing maintenance and support costs up to 50%
• Virtually eliminating equipment write-offs
• Reducing non-value added time spent by technical personnel as much as 90%
• Increasing speed from 10% to 50% in the asset-intensive processes  in engineering and manufacturing

Practitioners With an MS Access Database

Practitioner noun

prac.ti.tion.er

: A person actively engaged in an art, discipline or profession

When Sente began operations in 1997 we were a services company focused on helping companies that owned asset-intensive test operations reduce their costs.  We developed a whole set of practices for how to do this and went to market. It was our initial sketch of the full suite of solutions we have today.  We specified a set of roles, metrics, and processes all aimed at the results we were promising:  increased utilization and reduced cost.  We called each of the roles “Practitioners”:  logistics practitioners, inventory management practitioners, test processes engineering practitioners etc.

Initially, we used a Microsoft Access database to keep track of assets but knew this would create scale problems for us.  Within a few short months, we knew we’d have to abandon Access and acquire an enterprise solution.  While I knew we could have been more efficient with our delivery if we had an enterprise system, we were producing results way beyond anything we our customers had heard of.

From MS Access to The Web

Our CIO did an extensive search for capabilities available in the marketplace and to my disbelief, we couldn’t find anything that would work.  What we found were common asset tracking solutions.  They had none of the capabilities that we needed to drive results:

• An ability to measure and report utilization
• Metrics that were leading and lagging indicators of operational, technical, and financial outcomes
• No workflow support for our logistical, technical, capacity and inventory management functions

We knew if we were going to get a system that would support our practices, we’d have to develop it on our own.  We hired software developers to work with our practitioners creating software that supported our operations.  The first big win was eliminating “sneaker net”, the process of running copies of data files from one location to the next, across parking lots and down highways.  It took place every evening after customer operations shut down.

Today: Still Driven by Practitioners and Outcomes

Our first mobile application was a “dumb” inventory scanner. When mobile computers came to market we were amazed to see many of the asset management companies we knew at the time reproducing their “dumb” applications on those smart platforms.  The first “smart” mobile device we called a “Mobile Practitioner” because it enabled our practitioners to do their jobs remote from their desktop, enabled them to respond more quickly to customer demands while maintaining more accurate data and further reduce our costs.  It was a win for us and our customers.

Today we apply the same approach to our agile development with our focus still on tools that support the outcomes people are out to produce and we still can’t find anyone who has the capabilities we need to produce the results our customers are after.  Most of those capabilities are in our Enterprise Asset Management Accelerator packages,  used in conjunction with our asset management solutions.

Winning Awards and Going Beyond Mere Asset Management

We’ve won numerous awards over the years from our customers who were so excited by the measurable operating, technical and financial outcomes we helped them produce.  In 2017 our Scireo software was recognized for “Customer Value Leadership” by Frost and Sullivan for the measurable outcomes it enabled our customers to produce and report.  They also acknowledged that we had added significant capability and value to help enterprises transform their highly capital intensive enterprise processes in engineering and manufacturing.  We were honored to receive the award.

Sente’s Tools Capability go Beyond Software

While our Scireo software is critical to success, we also provide other tools that asset or resource management teams require to produce superior results with their customers.  These include:

• Reporting templates
• Newsletter templates
• Governance templates
• Communications plan templates
• Role Descriptions
• Process Maps
• Financial Models
• Capability Maturity Models