The Maintenance department is one of the most critical departments in any organization. Without a fully functional maintenance team, you can seldom realize the full potential of your production facility.

But, are you satisfied with the way your Maintenance team has been functioning? Or, you may want to explore an easier yet better way to make your Maintenance team more productive.

With CMMS solutions, increasing the efficiency of your Maintenance team can be super simple.

This article contains the top tips that you need to keep in mind to create a next-generation ready Maintenance department.

But, before we delve deeper, let’s understand the things that are the hallmark of a high-quality Maintenance department.

The Tasks of a Top-Class Maintenance Department

In essence, the primary task of the Maintenance Team is to ensure that the machines, equipment, and assets stay reliable and productive through its lifespan. Besides this, the Maintenance department needs to execute the following tasks:

• Evaluate the status and working condition of an asset
• Take steps to improve an asset’s reliability
• Conduct health-check of machines and equipment to ensure that they never pose a security risk
• Collaborate with other departments to meet production goals
• Ensure that the maintenance activities stay within the budget
• Incorporate up-to-date maintenance techniques, including a CMMS software

On its face, all these tasks may seem easy to a seasoned Maintenance Manager, but issues arise when the team is especially large, and the manager has to look after more than one facility. Integrating them all while ensuring utmost productivity can be challenging for even a veteran Maintenance Manager.

If this seems resonating, worry no more, as a Computerized Maintenance Management System, or CMMS, is there to make all of it far easier than you can think.

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Enhancing the Maintenance Department’s Output With CMMS

Gone are days when a Maintenance Manager had to sit on a pile of papers, carry out physical inspections by halting work, and compile reports. The Maintenance department was one of the heaviest units in any organization, as many people spent days to do the work that the software can do in minutes. A CMMS software enables you to track assets, plan inspections, measure performance, and optimize the output by carrying out timely maintenance.

A CMMS software helps restructure the Maintenance department in four broad ways.

• It improves the workflow
• It makes asset management easier
• It reduces the cost of maintenance
• It simplifies tracking and reporting

Let us now explore how you can use each of these features to reshape and optimize your Maintenance department.

The All-in-One Dashboard

As a Maintenance Manager, you can consider the CMMS software as your most trusted companion. The integrated dashboard will provide you with every detail that you will ever need about the assets.

Work orders are an integral part of the Maintenance department. Any experienced manager knows the time and labor it takes to execute the process.

With CMMS software, you can create, schedule, assign, review, filter, analyze, and submit work orders digitally. You can also use it to get automatic and timely alerts. If this is not enough, you may also include checklists, notes, and guidelines in the work order to make the task time-bound and audit-friendly.

Sometimes, in a big organization, communication can be a challenge. At times, the manager may need to reschedule priorities, realign tasks, and evaluate the performance of current work orders, all at the same time. With CMMS, you do not need to sift through papers physically, call up responsible technicians, and struggle to meet deadlines, as the software gives you the perfect platform to make it all very systematic.

Hence, CMMS software can streamline the process of work order execution, ensure faster maintenance activities, and improve the workflow.

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Asset Management Simplified

Sometimes, you spend a lot of time to organize asset hierarchies, only to discover later that you skipped including an essential component. Or, there may be situations when you have to redo the process because of the inclusion of a new asset or asset class. All of these increase the overall cost of the Maintenance department and, in the worst case, hits production.

If you need a breather, . It can enable you to create asset profiles, hierarchies, monitor equipment’s performance, get information on-the-go, and build Standard Operating Procedure for your team.

With CMMS software, you can see a healthy improvement in Key Performance Indicator (KPI) metrics. Now, you do not have to wait for physical orders anymore, as you can automatically assign codes that would trigger work orders depending on the nature and type of the downtime event.

Hence, CMMS software not only makes asset management easier but also enhances asset uptime and improves productivity.

Higher Savings, Bigger Profits

The cost of a repair can often shoot through the roof. Additionally, as costs inflate, profits deflate, making the Maintenance department a capital-guzzling department. And, any effort to downsize the maintenance budget can have a devastating effect on production activities.

A CMMS software can substantially reduce costs by reducing or, in some cases, eliminating the need for large-scale equipment upgradation. After all, why would someone waste money on acquiring new assets when the existing machines work perfectly.

Hence, by getting CMMS software, you can reduce the cost of maintenance and witness a healthy jump in your organization’s bottom line.

Worried About Reports? Not Anymore!

You work hard to create information-rich and data-heavy spreadsheets and do a lot of paperwork to streamline maintenance data. But, quite often, you may face difficulty to identify important data when you need it.

With CMMS, generating reports is as easy as is sifting through historical data. Broadly, the CMMS software can help you in the following ways:

• It calculates the MTTR, or the average time taken to repair an asset
• It calculates the MTBF or the average time a piece of equipment runs without any technical issue
• It compares the current problem with previous problems and helps you to spot a trend
• It enables quicker monitoring of cost-based data and find out areas that are consuming more money

The best work order software dives into a sea of numbers, and statistical data untangles them and finds a pattern that can provide you with insights you may use to make better business decisions.

Hence, CMMS software simplifies tracking and reporting and makes your production facility a hundred percent audit-friendly.

Conclusion

Creating a high-performance Maintenance department takes time. However, the best-in-class CMMS software can accelerate the transformation. Ensure that you train your staff effectively to reap the maximum benefits from the software.