Today, more companies understand the benefits of implementing a CMMS (.Computerized Maintenance Management System) In the past, maintenance management systems were only found in manufacturing companies but we are now seeing maintenance software being used in other areas such as education, healthcare, public services, facilities, retail among others. If you do not use a CMMS solution but you think your company might needs a maintenance management, going through these points can be very useful.
How do I know if a CMMS solution is right for my organization?
Answering and analyzing the following questions can help you to know if your organization needs a maintenance management system.
What is the cost of unexpected stops in your company?
Check and analyze how much cost to your business stopping production processes. If your equipment downtown is quite high and you lose a considerable amount of sales and revenue, it might be the time to implement a CMMS software. This will lower maintenance costs, reduce equipment downtime and diminish possibilities of unexpected failures.
Are your overall maintenance costs increasing?
CMMS software can help you to reduce your overall maintenance costs and it can be useful to predict overall maintenance costs, improving budgeting, and planning. Reviewing all previous costs related to materials, resources, and repair activities will give you enough insights to estimate future costs.
What is the reliability of your physical assets?
What we gain by maintaining our physical assets working properly is uptime: the capacity to product and provide goods and services. You depend on those assets for productivity and revenue generation and you want to maintain them at the lowest cost to sustain their performance.
If your equipment has costly maintenance or breakdowns, you might consider having in place a Computerized Maintenance Management Software.
How often are your assets failures and which are the most frequent breakdown?
Which is the most frequent equipment failure? Do you have a failure history? An astonishing 98% of companies lack good data on failure history most of them deal with equipment failure on a reactive basis, once the equipment fails. The lack of knowledge of what tends to provoke failures makes hard to implement an effective preventive maintenance.
Do you know which assets are costing you the most and why?
Keeping maintenance costs to a minimum is impossible without knowing which assets are costing you the most and why those costs are so high. This is where CMMS comes into play. When you combine that with additional information like the average cost of downtime per hour, identifying the most expensive assets and finding out the reasons becomes easier.
What is your average time to repair?
A basic measure of the maintainability of repairable items is mean time to repair (MTTR), which represents the average time required to repair a failed component or device. Mathematically, it is the total corrective maintenance time for failures divided by the total number of corrective maintenance actions for failures during a given timeframe. If your MTTR is too high, you need to put in place a robust incident-management process and define roles in your incident-management command structure.
What are your average time between failures (MTBF)?
Knowing how often a specific group of assets breaks down allows you to forecast and predict when the next breakdown may occur. This information enhances your maintenance planning efforts and allows you to allocate your maintenance resources.
Do you have a preventive maintenance program in place?
If you do not, it means that you do not have standardized processes and procedures in place involving automation. Preventive maintenance is essential for any industry because serves to reduce equipment downtime. Not only reduces the amount of time and money spent on repairing equipment. It also increases productivity and the life expectancy of equipment and reduces production standstills. If your maintenance department is still working from a manual or book, a clipboard or spreadsheets, you should be considering preventive maintenance software.
Do you need to reduce human errors?
Human errors can be quite expensive. Having a computerized system, you can track every movement and the entire information will be recorded automatically, without human intervention. Consequently, you will get highly accurate and reliable data and you will not longer need to conduct manual inventory checks, reducing human errors significantly.
What is your budget for maintenance this year?
The maintenance budget will generally range from 20% – 50% of the annual operating budget. The most important component of maintenance is inspection. A well-planned preventive maintenance is the cornerstone of a cost-effective facilities management program. You also need to update your maintenance procedures especially if it has been several years since someone really audited it.
What is the average delay in work orders?
If the average time to complete work order is increasing, you should get concerned. To reduce delays you can break up large maintenance jobs into smaller tasks of a few days or less and have a work order for each task. Having a computerized work order system improves response time to critical work orders. When an elevator breaks down or a pipe bursts, minutes can equate to a lot of money. If improving response time to unplanned maintenance is an objective, implementing computerized maintenance software will help you achieve this.
Do you keep data about all the maintenance tasks?
Information is the most valuable resource on earth. It can help your company to optimize every decision while foreseeing problems and preparing for them before they become company-killers.
Maintenance software takes all the information you already collect and makes it easier to log and find, especially because technicians can carry asset histories, work orders, audit logs, and more in their pocket with mobile CMMS apps, which also guarantee the traceability of the information.
The communication between your maintenance team is not great
When you do not have a CMMS software, there can be confusion about priorities work orders, and due dates. CMMS facilitates improved communication between your workers and keeps your team on the same page. Then managers can quickly change work priorities, work orders, and due dates and communicate them quickly to the whole maintenance team.
Do you need to ensure better safety?
The platform can help your business to prevent major malfunctions whilst keeping machines and equipment healthy and identifying problem areas and addressing the issues immediately.
When your equipment meets certain safety standards, you reduce the risk of critical failures and you automatically minimize any chance of accidents and ensure a safer work environment.
Do you have all the necessary data in one place?
Are you tired of going through endless spreadsheets, emails, text messages, calendars or other insufficient methods of tracking? Within a CMMS you can have work orders, maintenance schedules, work histories, stock levels, machine health and asset information in one place that can be accessed from anywhere. Analyzing all that data, you will understand better your future needs and will be able to organize, automate, and simplify your maintenance operations.
Do you need to improve accountability?
If you want to track each work order’s progress, status, delays, costs, and time spent on that, a CMMS is the answer. You will be able to keep track of everything from your dashboard with real-time updates, avoiding a host of accountability issues. The system will show clearly who was responsible for any given task, the progress of that task, and any comments as to the task’s status.
Do you need to eliminate preventive maintenance waste?
The asset performance data tells you how many times a machine has broken down. If you find an asset never facing problems, there is a possibility you are doing too much preventive maintenance on it. That is what we call ‘preventive maintenance waste. Using CMMS to identify preventive maintenance waste is yet another advantage.
If you want to know more about CMMS, check this article.
