The article below has been circulated widely and reproduced in a number of engineering trade journals. An Operations Director for a famous manufacturing company told me she had distributed it to her entire maintenance team to assist in the assessment of software packages to manage their workload.
At one time, the maintenance department in many organisations was primarily regarded as an overhead cost, one which was unfairly placed first in line when it came to budget cuts. These days, it is generally accepted that the maintenance function can play a pivotal role in improving operational efficiency, supporting regulatory compliance and reducing costs.
Some maintenance teams use a CMMS (computerised maintenance management software) package to plan, schedule and report on their workload. Unfortunately, and for a variety of reasons, it is not uncommon to hear that a CMMS implementation has not delivered the anticipated operational or financial benefits.
It certainly doesn’t have to be that way. There is no reason why a CMMS project should not start delivering measurable benefits almost immediately - and you can make this much more likely to happen by ensuring that your CMMS evaluation scores highly in 4 key areas; which handily, all begin with the same letter.
These are The Four I’s of Successful CMMS.
1.INPUT: A crucial component of a successful CMMS project is how easily the system can be used day-to-day. If a new maintenance work order cannot be entered into the CMMS as quickly as one could be written down on paper, the system will be viewed as a management tool which makes things more difficult without offering anything in return. In time, such a system will fall by the wayside.
Ensure that you select a CMMS that is straightforward to use, particularly for employees who may not have prior experience of IT systems. Fortunately, the ethos of software design in recent times has put ‘user experience’ at the forefront of the best CMMS products so that your staff, be they time-served engineer or tech-savvy graduate, should be able to raise, view or close a maintenance work order in a few seconds.
Most CMMS systems can now be deployed on devices like touchscreens, smartphones and tablets, so that input and retrieval of maintenance information can be carried out in the work area and on the move.
2.INFORM: Your CMMS must become a reliable source of information. If not, there is a danger that it will become sidelined. Users should be able to access the things they need to do their jobs quickly and easily, from today’s work orders and on-hand parts quantities to method statements and shift event logs.
Just as importantly, accurate CMMS data can make an immediate improvement to an organisation’s performance in external audits from customers and other regulatory bodies. The ability to retrieve the entire maintenance history and PM schedule for any plant item at an instant can swiftly tick a box that may otherwise have presented a problem.
It should also be possible to maximise the value of your CMMS as an information resource by linking it with other software systems, for example, finance, health & safety or plant automation.
3.IMPLEMENT: It is of paramount importance that your supplier is able to implement CMMS in a way that benefits engineers, managers and the organisation as a whole. What that requires is a project manager with an engineering background.
An IT technician who comes to site, gets the software working and runs through its basic functions can only do so much. In order to fully realise the benefits of CMMS, the implementation should be guided by a project manager who understands engineering maintenance and its importance. That person will be best able to advise you on how the system should be set up, what can be achieved, where the benefits can be realised and help to ensure that those objectives are met.
4.IMPROVE: The determining factor of a successful CMMS project is the extent of measurable improvement that has been achieved. Whether your objective is a percentage increase in planned maintenance, a reduction in machine downtime, rationalisation of inventory or simply cutting the cost of maintenance, your chosen system should be able to support it.
Your CMMS must offer a library of reports that enable you to establish very easily where problems exist and what their root causes are. Some modern systems not only give access to historical data, but offer web-based dashboards that display departmental performance and KPI's in real-time, so that immediate remedial action can be taken and thereby best-practice established.
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