Facilities management encompasses a wide range of tasks and attends to the space needs, repairs, and maintenance of both infrastructure and equipment and ensures compliance with regulations.
It includes both physical and non-physical aspects of facilities with the ultimate goal of providing a well-functioning and safe environment that helps optimize productivity and operational efficiency. Without an effective plan in place, businesses risk significant productivity losses due to prolonged downtime. Forbes reports that an automotive manufacturer loses around $22000 per minute if the production line malfunctions. However, by investing in a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) solution, organizations can automate facilities and maintenance management, enabling the implementation of strategic plans to monitor and optimize maintenance activities. Let’s explore some of the key ways in which CMMS facilitates maintenance management for your organization:
- Enhanced asset safety: Real-time asset tracking is a valuable feature offered by CMMS, ensuring that your assets are always in the best possible shape. This feature allows you to schedule preventive maintenance strategies effectively, thereby improving the condition of their existing assets and prolonging their lifespan. Preventive maintenance strategies optimize workflows and reduce the chances of unexpected breakdowns on site. By conducting regular inspections and carrying out necessary repair activities like lubrication, tightening loose screws, or replacing air filters, organizations can prevent unforeseen asset breakdowns. Additionally, CMMS empowers you to set maintenance schedules, eliminating the need for manual handling of maintenance routines and saving both time and costs.
- Improved cost-effectiveness: Proper facilities maintenance not only helps control costs but also reduces them through proactive management. CMMS facilitates the implementation of maintenance strategies that ensure optimal asset performance based on your business needs and the nature of your assets. By enabling you to track the cost of work orders and log work, CMMS allows you to keep a record of the costs incurred. You can easily calculate the costs associated with inventory consumed in each work order. This level of cost control ensures better financial management while optimizing the utilization of inventory and assets – for example, helping you to avoid overstocking.
- Compliance tracking: Compliance tracking allows you to ensure that organizations adhere to internationally recognized health and safety standards and fulfill their legal obligations. Businesses can conduct periodic audits and inspections to ensure the quality of their assets and quickly identify assets that need special attention, enabling immediate action. CMMS platforms keep track of maintenance schedules and facilitate compliance through audits and checklists. This significantly reduces operational risks, saves you from unnecessary costs, and establishes a safe work environment where all assets are well-maintained.
Harnessing the power of CMMS for streamlined facilities management
Facilities management is a complex operation that requires automation and a well-functioning system, like a CMMS, to track asset maintenance. A comprehensive CMMS helps consolidate your data to improve the visibility of your assets, and by eliminating manual processes, it allows you to create proactive work order schedules, greatly enhancing efficiency.
Here are the key steps to best harness the power of a CMMS:
Step 1: Identify your business goals
Analyze your business goals to align business processes directly with desired outcomes. Goals can include:
1. Executing preventive maintenance plans successfully
2. Reducing communication barriers between teams responsible for managing business assets
3. Maximizing worker safety
4. Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), such as Mean Time to Respond, maintenance cost, work order costs, and more
Identifying your goals allows you to conduct performance checks and compare achievements over time. This further helps identify potential problems if the goals are not being achieved and take timely corrective actions
Step 2: Assess current equipment condition
Next, assess the current equipment condition to develop a baseline for your facilities maintenance plan. CMMS provides you with a consolidated asset database that is accessible at all times and includes equipment specifications, maintenance checklists, warranties, repair history, and more. By having all this information in one place, facility managers can easily review the current condition of assets and their maintenance requirements.
Conduct regular inspections and audits to evaluate the performance and depreciation of assets, enabling informed decision-making regarding repairs or replacements. Tracking each asset’s condition and executing maintenance activities as planned ensures that no asset is neglected or poorly maintained.
Step 3: Implement work order management
Effective work order management is the foundation of a facilities management system. Facility managers rely on work orders for the execution of maintenance tasks, and work orders allow managers to streamline and track maintenance tasks, ensuring that work is completed on time, and equipment downtime is minimized. A work order is likely to fall into the following categories:
1. Repair: Created to cover maintenance of assets that have broken down unexpectedly or are experiencing malfunctions.
2. Inspection: Created to highlight that an asset needs to be checked for any potential malfunctions or repair requirements.
3. Preventive: Created for tasks related directly to routine maintenance of assets to prevent breakdowns.
4. General: Created to deal with requests on delivery, purchasing, and more.
Work orders provide a structured framework for documenting essential information, such as the equipment involved, priority level, problem description, and required resources. Assigning work orders to the appropriate technicians enables the timely resolution of urgent issues by leveraging each associate’s specific expertise. Additionally, managers can use work orders to set due dates and allocate resources effectively, which helps streamline the overall maintenance management process. Together, these practices contribute to the successful management of facilities.
Step 4: Track work progress
Monitoring maintenance KPIs is essential for optimizing facilities performance by enabling facility managers to make informed decisions. With established goals, managers can track them over time to understand how well maintenance tasks are done, and whether targets are being met. A few common metrics include Mean Time to Respond, Average Uptime, Mean Time to Repair, and more. Your CMMS platform will update these numbers for you automatically, providing clear direction to channel resources, improve performance, and reduce costs.
Comparison reports are an insightful way to manage your facilities better through data over time. Detailed reports enable managers to spot emerging issues and identify useful patterns. A data-driven approach can help foster a culture of continuous improvement, allowing facility managers to implement corrective actions, optimize processes, and enhance overall facilities’ efficiency.
Step 5: Focus on Timely Maintenance
Effective communication between requesters and maintenance personnel is crucial for timely issue resolution. To develop this channel and provide effective maintenance resolutions, CMMS platforms offer integrations with popular ticketing and issue-tracking systems, such as Zendesk. These integrations help expedite issue resolution and develop a bridge between the issue reported and technicians, communicating all relevant information on the issue. When a service request is created in the ticketing system, it can be automatically synchronized inside of CMMS, creating a corresponding work order for further processing and tracking.
Successful maintenance management tracks all maintenance operations so even the slightest of issues can be corrected, providing impactful operational improvements. For example, a manager can set a goal to reduce response time to maintenance or repair requests. With the help of a CMMS platform, managers can analyze this key metric and correlate with customer satisfaction scores. This helps identify bottlenecks, optimize processes, and drive continuous improvement in managing maintenance requests. With enhanced data synchronization and ticketing integrations, facility managers can streamline facilities operations and allocate the correct resources to optimize productivity and growth.
Step 6: Effective team management
A CMMS platform is ideal for improving communication and collaboration between your team members, due to real-time updates and centralization of actvity data. For example, if technician A needs to schedule an inspection of a batch of printers, but one printer is currently with technician B for repair, technician A can quickly see in CMMS the availability of the printer for inspection, allowing instant and accurate scheduling. In this way, having access to maintenance planners allows multiple technicians to collaborate with much higher efficiency. Moreover, a cloud-based system allows authorized members to easily access important information securely, from any web-connected device.
Within the system, you can tag or mention team members to ensure a prompt response, bringing the task to their attention, and helping ensure completion. The member is also notified so they never miss important updates and can access the task information when needed.
Read more: 5 Ways Maintenance Management Software Helps Streamline Equipment Operations and Service Processes
CMMS for enhanced maintenance operations and facilities management
In conclusion, CMMS and facilities management are closely intertwined. CMMS serves as a powerful tool for efficient both maintenance and asset management, allowing you to seamlessly manage a myriad of business processes. With a real-time, 360-degree view of your maintenance processes, you can easily take steps to automate and centralize your daily maintenance activities. By investing in a reliable CMMS platform, organizations can harness the benefits of streamlined facilities management, ensuring efficient asset management, reducing costs, and optimizing overall operations.
About EZO CMMS
EZO CMMS is the next generation maintenance management software. It does more than just simple maintenance, it empowers your teams with a central command center to assign and complete work orders to achieve optimal productivity. We offer a free 15-day trial – no credit card required!
