From managing maintenance and service requests throughout a medium-sized enterprise to keeping track of ongoing equipment maintenance at a large manufacturing plant, a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) has proven itself as a vital business tool.
When choosing a CMMS, businesses look for features like preventive maintenance scheduling, seamless equipment management, and solid asset assignments—and insightful maintenance reports to reduce maintenance costs. An automated CMMS solution enables organizations to control operations from a centralized platform and track progress to expedite work orders.
Let’s take a look at six key CMMS features that can help your company run smoothly and with minimal downtime:
1.Prolong your assets’ life with preventive maintenance
Without a proper maintenance strategy, your assets will wear out more quickly, potentially losing years of useful life, resulting in disruption and hefty replacement costs. For example, if a staff member does not keep a regular check on equipment vulnerable to corrosion, there is an elevated chance that it will fail suddenly. This can cause you higher repair costs as compared to the minimal cost of orderly replacement that a proper equipment maintenance plan would allow.
A CMMS enables you to set up preventative maintenance to detect faults in your equipment before they cause breakdowns in your workflow. Implementing a CMMS helps you preserve assets and achieve equipment’s maximum life expectancy while saving time and money.
2. Minimize costs by tracking maintenance expenses
CMMS software enables businesses to manage the maintenance of equipment that keeps their operations viable. This improves service quality, lowers response times, and deepens collaboration.
With equipment maintenance software, you can set recurring service intervals and set start and end dates. Or you can specify in software that items are automatically sent for maintenance upon check-in. This will ensure that equipment is always checked for cosmetic or operational flaws before the next check-out.
Preventive maintenance software enables more than better scheduling: it lets you analyze your cost data. Tracking recurring service and maintenance costs enables you to make strategic, cost-based decisions. If a particular division in your company is going through spare parts quicker than expected, you’ll need to investigate; one good place to start is by ensuring that equipment is being put into maintenance at the expected, appropriate intervals.
An efficient CMMS solution helps facilities managers save time and money while keeping the maintenance operations running smoothly. It enables you to create calendar-based work orders automatically while taking care of recurring physical tasks, such as battery replacements or periodic machine lubrication. Work order management can be automated on the basis of a machine part’s condition or status. For example, preventive maintenance software can generate vehicle work orders automatically at specified mileage intervals. This offers obvious utility in the manufacturing and construction industries.
3. Achieve optimal productivity with lower downtime
With better command of preventive maintenance tasks, you can reduce equipment downtime and increase uptime. According to one study, enterprise downtime costs can be up to $22,000/minute. To minimize delays caused by out-of-commission equipment, you can prioritize and automate maintenance tasks according to how business critical each piece is.
Computerized maintenance management system ensures minimal downtime for your equipment in various ways. It makes use of data to ensure efficient scheduling, preventing any major interruptions in your workflow by avoiding conflict with your most important production times. A well-tuned CMMS will instead enable you to schedule maintenance during low-impact times or in times when particular equipment is not needed. It also ensures that the right personnel and replacement equipment are on hand to actually complete the maintenance.
4. Accelerate maintenance with automated inventory control
Having your maintenance team wait on parts to arrive is frustrating and time-consuming. Delays can hinder work orders on a regular basis due to non-availability of inventory and parts on order. CMMS comes with inventory control and management tools. These allow maintenance managers to watch inventory levels proactively, to ensure that critical parts will be on hand when they’re needed.
With a CMMS in place, businesses have more control over their inventory and spare parts, making inventory management smarter. When tracking items and parts from one location using categories or item-specific identifiers like inventory ID, work order category, equipment model, and vendor, you’ll be able to understand inventory across the entire organization faster. Knowing assets’ location is only one aspect, too: having this detailed view helps you stamp out redundancy in purchasing parts and equipment.
Inventory management features in a CMMS also help businesses move parts between locations, preventing them from over- or understocking by setting stock quantity thresholds. It makes it easier for managers to keep checks on equipment and inventory records, and avoid going short of critical equipment.
5. Monitor progress with seamless team management
Without maintenance management software, it’s difficult to measure employees’ performance in performing fixes or routine maintenance. Most companies assign paper-based orders to staff members and effectively dispose of them when finished. There is no way to figure out who was assigned which work order, how well it was performed, or how long it took to finish. This causes inefficiency in equipment maintenance, and makes it hard to reward people based on their performance, to identify and motivate staff members who have had trouble finishing work orders, or to identify troublesome equipment so you don’t overburden your staff.
CMMS saves you from the hassle of skimming through files and spreadsheets. You can now plan, assign and schedule work orders from a centralized command center. View the status of all work orders and get a snapshot of user progress all in a single place. Cater to work requests and speed up unassigned work orders by allocating tasks to available team members.
Keep track of key metrics with user-friendly graphs and insights that help you scale productivity, overtime, costs incurred, date of service completion. All this and more is tracked under maintenance history, and proper actions are taken for problematic areas.
6. Increase safety and compliance
Equipment that has not been properly maintained can be a hazard for your employees, and at the same time increase the risk of your business running into legal compliance issues. Even if you avoid accidents or injuries, violations or poor documentation of safety practices can result in heavy fines.
A CMMS insulates your business from all these risks by ensuring your equipment is kept in great working condition. And by ensuring the condition of your equipment’s safety components, you can confidently comply with local, regional or national safety standards.
A computerized maintenance management system also saves you a great deal of audit paperwork. Generate reports that document your maintenance practices to demonstrate regulatory compliance — and save your business from harsh penalties.
Why Does Your Business Need a CMMS Solution?
With an increasingly competitive landscape businesses cannot set up their maintenance teams as reactive – fixing things only when it seems unavoidable, and when every fix is urgent. The idea is to work smarter, instead. Implementing a CMMS helps organize maintenance schedules, manage assets and inventory control, track equipment parts, prioritize work orders and more. Spend your limited time and money on your core business tasks rather than fixing things at double the price.
