Have you been tasked to minimize your equipment downtime, increase asset condition visibility and spare parts? If so, this can be a daunting task for an asset–heavy organization to move to a more proactive maintenance routine without the proper tools.
A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) can accomplish this goal through the following tools:
- Increased team collaboration via application based commenting system
- Accurate reports to help you plan and optimize maintenance plans and parts availability
- A single source of truth will allow a business to avoid duplicate work orders
In the recent 2020 Benchmarks & Best Practices for Maintenance Management Report, facilities using an effective CMMS have reported seeing 88% cost savings ranging from tens of thousands to millions of dollars.
4 ways a CMMS can improve your business:
1. Reduce Equipment Downtime
Lowering equipment downtime is a common objective in any asset-heavy organization. Typically manufacturers experience an average of 800 hours of unplanned downtime annually. These incidents can take a heavy toll and result in an average cost of $17,000. In some industries, downtime can have a massive impact, costing your business $50,000 per minute, which translates to $3 million per hour.
Equipment failure, human error, and low visibility into asset conditions are some of the reasons for these incidents. With a CMMS solution, you can avoid these unplanned downtimes by replacing physical paperwork and application silos by introducing a single source of truth to track:
- Workflow and work orders
- Asset and physical equipment conditions
- Accurate supplies counts (parts, materials, etc.)
- Service schedules and invoicing
Having instant access to this data can help you build more proactive maintenance plans for your assets and equipment. Enhanced reporting on these metrics will allow your team to analyze failures and, in turn, minimize future incidents.
2. Maximize Labour Force Efficiency
Maintenance managers need direct access to PM plans, asset documentation, and part supply info. Without this information, issues can arise, such as duplicate work orders and increased overtime costs. These are the hallmarks of a reactive maintenance cycle vs. a proactive approach. With the proper CMMS tools, a technician will gain insight into the following:
- Create, evaluate, prioritize, delegate, and monitor work orders from any system by managers and operators. When a work order is done, they will also receive up-to-the-minute updates.
- When there is a new job order, technicians will be notified immediately, and valuable information such as repair histories, checklists, asset manuals are easily accessible.
- Users can plan proactive maintenance by setting up triggers for time, use, or condition-based maintenance.
- Technicians can add notes immediately onsite, mark a job as complete, and let others know a specific asset’s status.
With all this data readily available, maintenance managers can make more informed choices regarding labor costs and efficiency. Creating a comprehensive preventive maintenance plan becomes a reality with a CMMS system, which saves your organization downtime and lowers costs.
3. Extend the Life of your Assets and Raise Their Reliability
To improve the efficiency and reliability of maintenance operations, creating a preventive maintenance plan is necessary. Predictive analytics yield a tenfold return on investment, according to one study, and results in savings of 30 percent to 40 percent. Organizations that configure the bulk of their Assets in a CMMS report significant improvements in equipment reliability.
A CMMS system places all of your PM dashboards and data in one place. Because of this, maintenance planners see the big picture and improve their KPIs via the following tools:
- Generation of custom reports on asset downtime and costs to improve maintenance plan
- Quick access to all related Asset documentation such as work order history, required safety equipment, and failure codes
- Real–time tracking of metrics (e.g., mileage, gauge readings, and operational hours)
- Integration with other systems for business-wide collaboration
All this functionality in your hands will lead to the automation of maintenance plans and insight into improvement areas.
4. Upgrade your Inventory Management Tools
Maintaining your MRO stock (maintenance, repair, and operating supply) is essential for reducing downtime. Your technicians need to be able to order parts easily to complete repairs on time. MRO supply can be costly. In many cases, MRO accounts can make up as much as 40% of a business‘s annual procurement budget.
A modern CMMS tool can assist with inventory management, save time on repairs and reduce duplicate orders by:
- Providing real–time tracking of spare parts and all relevant data (i.e., purchase date, availability, and locations where the part is stored)
- Automating purchases of parts to avoid extending downtime on repairs
- Reporting on inventory costs, order history, and usage metrics
- Notifications sent to Technicians of which parts are required
Implementing a CMMS solution can have an immediate positive impact on your equipment uptime and increase your ROI. Moving away from reactive maintenance will result in fewer equipment malfunctions and raise efficiency across the organization.
