RedGage

You probably may have heard so much about CMMS – a computerized maintenance management system and how it is the best thing to have happened to maintenance asset management. But the thing is, you don’t even know what it is and how it relates with your small and medium size business – maybe it’s for larger organizations with huge budgets and big machineries to maintain you thought.

Wrong.

Machinery and equipment require routine maintenance, updates and to be cared for in order to continue functioning optimally. A neglect could lead to downtimes which may be disastrous for your business. Think: loss of manpower hour, escalation of cost of production, halt in production, delayed order delivery, livid customers and the list goes on and on. A maintenance mishap could have a domino effect – affecting almost every aspect of your business.

So you see, you should care and learn what you can about CMMS and how to leverage it to turn your maintenance team into the efficient, agile team it was supposed to be. Bearing that in mind, here are things you need to know about CMMS.

A CMMS is a centralized database system that essentially maintains information about your organization’s maintenance workflow. Depending on how it is set up, it can track work orders, labor information, purchasing, and inventory. It basically handles those tedious deskwork, freeing you to focus more on maintaining your organization’s assets.

It should be noted that a CMMS is not a magic software to cure all you maintenance issues, but it is designed to push you to become more efficient and productive through:

Centralizing all maintenance Data in one System:The database enables you to pull all information about your organization’s maintenance operations into one system, making it easy to access different information about a task. Take for instance, a staff creates a work order, depending on how this system is set up it does the follow: checks which technician is available, checks available spare parts, checks the status of the equipment, etc. Providing you at a glance all the information you need to make an informed decision – and all of these are done with just few clicks.

It helps mangers avoid scheduling mistakes:How many times have you had delays in carrying out a maintenance task due to errors in assigning the work to a technician already engaged, and unavailability of spare parts? This oversight could have been avoided if only there’s a more efficient way of tracking your inventory and schedule which a CMMS provides.

It assists Managers in planning: most CMMS packages in the market have scheduling features that allow you plan ahead for preventive maintenance. You are able to set due date for maintenance and when the date reaches, it automatically generates a work order complete with all the information the assigned technician will need, hence eliminating the odds for mistakes.  For example,forklifts have maintenance schedules that should be done on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

In Summary, a CMMS is a great tool for maintenance departments, not only does it offer you the ability to take preventative measures, it also has predictive features that allow you predict when next to take action. However, this will largely depend on how you set up your system. So a CMMS is actually an investment that has huge impact on your team’s productivity and bottom-line.