Benefits of CMMS
Most maintenance department functions have been affected in some way by the arrivals of CMMS. Among those function affected the most are: generating work orders, tracking inventory, setting up preventative maintenance (PM) and producing reports. The CMMSs can provide can both be short- and long-term benefits. Some of these benefits are:
? Standardized work order will reduce time, and paper work.
? All information combined into a central location decrease work time.
? Permanent, accurate records will help reduce equipment down time.
? Standardized format aids organization and collection of information.
Long-term benefits should be apparent through weekly and monthly production reports. These include:
? Parts and materials availability will be increase.
? Maintenance labour effectiveness will increase.
? More regulated preventive maintenance will increase equipment life and help to reduce emergency maintenance costs.
? Production saving will increase as unscheduled downtime decrease.
? Purchase costs of parts and materials will be reduced.
? Outside contract costs will be reduced.
? Regular report gives a more effective and up-to-date record of inventory/stores reports, work orders and physical maintenance reports, which will reduce cost of parts, inventory and labour. Reports also help increase management control.
We will now look at some of these benefits in details:
Generating work order
Currently most form of CMMS are based on forms printed out for use by the maintenance workers. Workers enter information on the forms, which is re-entered into the system after the work is finished. Because the work order contains data entered directly by the technician, it is the focal point of a CMMS. The ability to prioritize work orders so they can accommodate each facility and functions has helped maintenance department considerably. For example some CMMS can prioritize work orders for each day so that those designated, as high priorities will automatically be first on the list orders to complete.
Maintenance departments, therefore can more easily discern a high-priority task from one that is routine, helping organized and improve the department’s efficiency.
Tracking inventory
Inventory modules on a CMMS have become especially helpful for facilities with more than one stores area. They allow the maintenance department to carefully track parts from the time they are logged in/or scanned in, in departments with bar coding capability to the time they are used. The module have been essential in helping departments set up purchasing schedules and track parts costs more carefully.
Inventory modules also help streamline maintenance departments when they are linked to work order modules. I this scenario, the work order screen can display whether the parts needed for the service work are available, saving time that would be spent checking individual parts lists or going to the stores area.
Also, the module can alert a facility when parts are almost gone, so parts can be reordered before they run out. This helps the maintenance department avoid extra downtime waiting for parts.
Setting up preventive maintenance (PM)
Maintenance departments are realizing the benefits of PM, and CMMS are essentials in helping establish such programs. The PM module reminds the maintenance department each time routine work is needs to be performed and alerts the department when a task is coming due, helping reduce the risk of missing regular maintenance work and lengthening the life of the equipment.
Developers of maintenance software, who keep a close watch on the many changes that are taking place in the maintenance management profession, say that their products in the future will continue to address and anticipate the many problems related to keeping commercial and institutional facilities operating both efficiently and cost-effectively.
Decisions support system
Data that is collected by the CMMS –including hours worked, failure codes, equipment and system downtime, repair costs, and repair time are been used to support operational decisions, such as reliability analysis to compare manufactures, maintenance effectiveness, and justification of outsourcing specific maintenance functions.
Regulatory Compliance
Most regulatory agencies expect to be able to review and audit regulatory compliance through a CMMS. Not that long ago, paper records were the default standard for documentation.
Tomorrow’s CMMS
The latest crop of computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) tend to reflect the general advances in software that have been occurring at an exponential rate. Five years ago, Window –based program were the exception rather than the rule, and larger, multi-user systems were at best serve by mainframe or mini-systems.
Today’s CMMS releases are invariably 32-bits Window programs able to scale from a single-user standalone system to a 100-user client/server system.
Handheld data collection units and pen-based computer transferring data to and from a central database via the Internet are readily available, and historical data is analyzed for maintenance reliability information and for management and budgetary support.
Beyond inventory
Most CMMS started out as either work order management system or inventory control systems designed to be used by the maintenance the department to tract equipment/facility maintenance and to manage their spare parts inventories. In most cases manager made limited use of the historical information available. The role of CMMS system in many organizations, however, has started to transcend simply supporting the maintenance department. In many of today’s CMMS implementations, significantly greater requirements are placed upon the CMMS to provide tangible benefits and information to the company.
What will the next generation of CMMS bring to maintenance? Developer point to advances in ease of use, ease of integration with other applications, flexibility and speed.
They also acknowledge that the rapid rise of the World Wide Web as an information resource and conduit will continue to have tremendous effects, though in concrete terms, many questions remain about precisely what shapes those development will take.
Perhaps most provocatively for maintenance departments, developers say, a future generation of CMMS will go well beyond data collection, storage, retrieval and analysis.
Future CMMS applications, developers say, will have the ability to” learn” within parameters preset by users and will be able to offer maintenance technicians a series of options in a particular situation.
There is a major push a among CMMS developers to eliminate paper from the maintenance process with the next generation of software.
Several developers pointed to the advent of personal digital assistants (PDAs) as an example of more accessible CMMS of the future. PDA are portable handheld computers that allow users to bring computer functionality into areas of facilities that before had not been accessible.
PDAs, a well as CMMS that operate on them, will allow the technicians to more easily take work order information into the field, access this information, as well as the department’s database and collect information on the project for future downloading back into the database.
A soon-to-typical process might start with a telephone call from a building occupant reporting a problem, continue with an automatically generated work order prompted by the telephone call and end with a technician in the field receiving a message via pager alerting him of the reported problem.
Accessing the department’s CMMS through a PDA, the technician finds the work order request, complete the work and downloads the completed electronic work order back into the system all without the need for paper. The process cuts down on paper handling by creating essential data that is readily available by other software applications.
The CMMS application of tomorrow will give facility executives, maintenance and engineering managers and front-line technicians an unprecedented palette of options for collecting, reconfiguring and analyzing information than ever before.
Armed with this enhanced ability, as well as additional pieces of complementary technology, developer say workers will be better able to anticipate system and equipment problems, detect trouble spots, spotlight potential saving and, in the end, prepare more effective solutions to these situation.
The impact of the Internet on future CMMS is hard to overestimate. This will result in:
? Expanded data sharing capabilities. Companies with facilities miles or even thousand of miles apart will be able to use the internet to share a wide range of data related to all aspects of operations, including such key areas as inventory and project costs.
? Greater access to CMMS to casual users.
Conclusion
More companies are realizing every day that their business performance is closely related to how they manage their facilities and workplace assets. Operating expenses can be reduced at the same time real estate assets are maximized and employee productivity and the quality of worklife are enhanced.
Facilities-related expenses represent most companies second-largest operation cost, next to personnel and their greatest capital asset. As companies look for opportunities to improve financial performance and competitiveness new opportunity have to be explore. Success will depend upon the ability to identify, communicate and manage opportunities to support the company’s business objectives.
The following processes needs to be examined:
1. Monitoring how facilities are being used and managed
2. Evaluating whether facilities are best serving corporate objectives
3. Anticipating how facilities might better support the organization and respond to its changing need
The design/selection, development, implementation and monitoring of a CMMS is one opportunity which companies must take advantage if they are to succeed in the dynamic business environment.
The introduction of a CMMS and its monitoring and upgrade will enhance the company’s competitive edge. Benchmarking, that is researching how “best-in –class” have benefited from CMMS is a clear indicator that only those organization who implement proper CMMS will survive in the global market.
It is therefore imperative that organizations that have not implemented a CMMS should investigated the feasibility of implementing a system and organization with a system should ensure that the system is operating at optimum level and upgraded as required to effective and ensure that the organization is competitive.
The benefits to the organization includes:
? Reduce overall facility operating costs
? Boost productivity and product quality
? Improve resource utilization enhance warranty tracking
? Improve analysis and decision making
? Track inventories efficiently
? Reduce facility downtime
? Improve corporate competitiveness
? Reduce unscheduled outages
? Analyze equipment failure
? Increase profits