Maintenance management is essential for every to effectively manage their assets and ensure smooth operations. However, it’s a complicated task and is best done using a CMMS; but CMMS can be expensive, and that leads to companies wondering whether CMMS benefits outweigh its cost.
The truth is that the CMMS benefits a gets over time heavily outweigh the financial expense you incur on it.
In this article, we’ll go over what a Computerized Maintenance Management System is and what CMMS benefits can your organization enjoy using it.
Let’s dive in.
What is a CMMS Software?
A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) helps maintain and record all asset-related information while assisting maintenance teams with asset management.
A typical maintenance management software helps create work requests, track work orders, record asset history, and schedule tasks. CMMS systems help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of maintenance activity within an organization.
The average CMMS solution offers planning, scheduling, and active monitoring of various work orders. Therefore, it’s used in several industries, including manufacturing, utilities, energy, parks, school, and other industries.
In short, there are a few primary technical functions of a good CMMS software. Firstly, your CMMS helps with Work Order Management and preventive maintenance (also known as preventative maintenance). You can build, review, prioritize, assign, and track multiple work orders simultaneously. Meanwhile, you can use a preventive maintenance program to develop work orders for proactive maintenance rather than reactive maintenance.
At times, CMMS software are often called preventive maintenance software.
Secondly, you can check and track asset performance and reporting. You can analyze, access, and make use of equipment data to improve productivity and efficiency. Develop custom reports based on different KPIs to get a better idea of the maintenance activity and maintenance tasks and share them with all the stakeholders.
Thirdly, you get a maintenance software for MRO inventory management. You can effectively track thousands of spare parts, organize them, and manage your inventory purchasing system simultaneously. Rather than getting an enterprise asset management (EAM) system, you can get a CMMS that helps with inventory levels and management.
Lastly, you can easily audit everything using your CMMS. Your maintenance team can make audit preparations more easily as the CMMS helps record, track, and access all the data and information more effectively.
10 Top CMMS Benefits
The benefits of a CMMS may vary in different industries and organizations; however, they can be summarized into the following to reflect their advantage in all companies. If you're interested in learning via video, then watch below. Otherwise, skip ahead.
1. Work Orders and Requests
Traditionally, work orders used to be very tedious and involved tons of paperwork, sorting, and complicated file systems. As a result, there was a much higher chance of human error and oversight.
CMMS software helps make work order management easier by offering a categorizing system that’s easy to understand. You can submit work requests, and maintenance managers can put in work orders while tracking the requests.
You can send specific work orders to different team members simultaneously to complete the maintenance work. Meanwhile, you can track everything in real-time on your desktop, laptop, or mobile devices.
Some CMMS also offer full automation for work order development when certain conditions are met. For example, some conditions include work requests submitted by specific people, cycle counts of a machine, and measurements read by condition-monitoring sensors.
2. Easy Maintenance Scheduling
A large part of facilities management is planned maintenance scheduling. You need a proper maintenance strategy and use it to develop maintenance schedules for effective preventive maintenance.
It’s especially true for large organizations where there is massive equipment, assets, and facilities that require proactive maintenance. Some CMMS also offer fine-line schedule tuning so you can develop different schedules with a higher frequency.
The idea is to use a CMMS and different maintenance strategies for each aspect of the facility. The maintenance department has to work systematically to develop an individual preventive maintenance strategy for everything while focusing on specific areas that require more oversight.
3. Real-Time Asset Information
Every piece of equipment in your organization needs to be continually monitored and maintained. The idea isn’t to retain its asset value over time so you can sell it, if necessary; the idea is to increase productivity, lower repair costs, reduce maintenance costs, and ensure less downtime.
A CMMS allows you to have a complete overlook of all maintenance operations and assets. You can view any of assets, color-code them, symbolize asset health statuses, and check the historical data on each asset at any given moment.
Having this feature allows you to track down asset downtime, breakdown, and any other issues within the facility. You can also compare multiple facility areas to determine problem areas that require more maintenance operations and attention.
You can also filter work orders according to facility areas, work history, and more. Use the maintenance backlog to check what areas need to be prioritized, especially if you have limited labor resources.
4. Better Safety Standards and Healthier Facilities
Most CMMS have built-in options or can integrate with other software to help you maintain safety standards and stay compliant.
You can track and check the health and safety of the employees by using a proper database for things, such as material safety data sheets, inspection lists, and safety checks, among other things.
Your CMMS software may also have the option to enter employee injury reports, especially according to different equipment. This can help the maintenance managers and the organization learn from past mistakes a create safe working conditions. Eventually, this would also help streamline maintenance processes and help develop better maintenance activities.
5. Better Preventive Maintenance
Preventive maintenance has become a necessity in most facilities as a cost-effective and proactive maintenance procedure. It helps detect equipment issues and problems beforehand, ultimately reducing the breakdowns and overall downtime.
However, many maintenance teams struggle with scheduling more preventive maintenance. Your CMMS can help with that by automating work orders. PM triggers can be entered into your CMMS, based on time, usage, or conditions of assets. As soon as a PM trigger is activated, the CMMS automatically updates and enters a work order.
At the same time, you can develop a preventive maintenance checklist based on the maintenance tasks to ensure proper scheduling.
6. Improved Inventory Control
Inventory management is crucial to reducing the overall costs of any facility. Overspending on inventory can add a lot of costs, especially in terms of spare parts for the equipment.
Furthermore, you may end up with a lack of the appropriate spare part during equipment breakdown. Or, you may just not be able to find the parts in unorganized storerooms. In any case, it can lead to increased downtime, risky measures, rush shipping, and other issues.
CMMS inventory control can help you purchase, track, and organize parts to avoid costly decisions. Automated inventory reporting and purchasing help avoid human errors and improve decision-making.
7. Lesser Scrap and Rework in Manufacturing
Scrap and rework may seem like a side operation, but they require massive costs in the form of energy, waster, and lost production. It’s hard to make up for that cost with normal working conditions, and, at times, even when the production team is working overtime.
You can avoid any additional costs by removing any chance of unplanned asset failure. The best way to keep your assets healthy is by using preventive maintenance.
When you use CMMS software to plan, schedule, and execute various PMs, you essentially improve equipment uptime, increase the asset lifecycle, and reduce scrap and rework costs.
CMMS software excel at automating such PM tasks, and you can prioritize and assign those PMs while tracking the necessary metrics for complete optimization.
8. Track, Report and Manage Maintenance Costs
CMMS software tends to track every single task, activity, cost, expense, and metric. As a result, you have all the information on every work order, including parts, labor, and other expenses.
You can use all that data to determine the individual costs of each work order, each maintenance team member, and spare part. You can review the costs in real-time, check the budget distribution, and develop reports based on that data.
Using that data, you can make better and more educated decisions on repair and replace options. If you need to report to upper management, you can compare the costs of reactive maintenance with preventive maintenance to develop a case for proactive and planned maintenance.
9. Better Reporting with Relevant KPIs
It’s crucial to report to upper management with the right key performance indicators. You need to be able to show positive results in an easy-to-understand manner.
Maintenance KPIs help you benchmark your equipment against industry standards and help you identify any equipment problems.
Traditionally, it can be tedious and downright impossible to develop accurate KPI reports using Excel or on paper. The process is prone to human error, and mistakes can have exponential consequences.
CMMS software allows you to collect tangible data from various sources and areas of the maintenance operation. The software also provides several reporting templates and maintenance report forms that you can use to immediately convert the data into readable reports.
When you develop a better understanding of these KPIs, you can reduce the overall risk of equipment failure and add value to the production process.
You can analyze potential trends in production, identify problems and issues, track real-time costs, and more.
10. Develop Standardized Maintenance Processes for Your Organization
A lot of companies use the methodology of using a process that has worked before until it runs its course. Maintenance is an unpredictable process, and it becomes more volatile over time as assets get older.
You can’t follow the same processes each time and expect the same results. However, you can develop a universal maintenance checklist that looks for potential problems. Once you understand the problems, you can develop customized solutions for it.
It’s much better than starting from scratch each time with every PM, repair, and reporting job.
You can use your CMMS to build maintenance checklists, workflows, and reporting templates. Using all of them, you can create and manage more tasks in the same amount of time.
The process also makes all of these resources available digitally at all times. Anyone with access to the CMMS can access the information, follow best practices, and get the task done properly in time.
Choosing a CMMS for Your Organization
The bottom line is that CMMS benefits severely outweigh the cost of buying the software. The financial costs you save with longer asset lives, reduced downtime, reduced labor wastage, improved efficiency, and budgeted inventory management are massive.
If your organization or facilities require constant maintenance, opting for a CMMS will prove to be an excellent decision. There are different versions of CMMS software for different organizations.
However, if you’re confused about choosing a CMMS, you can talk to an expert or try out a free demo with Limble.
Josh is a partner at Maintenance Manager HQ.
