The Relationship Between Your Maintenance Department, CMMS, and Analytics
The concept of building maintenance has continually evolved since its inception. At first, it was important enough just to perform maintenance. Then computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) made it easier to plan and track the work.
Origianlly posted by Eagle Technology.
The concept of building maintenance has continually evolved since its inception. At first, it was important enough just to perform maintenance. Then computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) made it easier to plan and track the work. And now there are more and more options to analyze maintenance data and track the efficiency and progress of your maintenance plan. Each of these maintenance resources is important in the execution, planning, and measurement of your maintenance effort, and each resource needs to be considered and coordinated in the path to an efficient maintenance goal.
A maintenance team is the backbone of any successful facility. They’re the ones performing the preventive maintenance, tending to breakdowns and accidents, keeping track of inventory control, etc. The technicians can have an important effect on profitability by decreasing equipment downtime and recording important data for future planning and reporting. This is where a CMMS comes in.
A good CMMS will ensure that production systems operate as they are designed to, downtime is minimized and productivity is increased. While a CMMS may have seemed like a daunting task added to their maintenance work at one point, technicians these days are more computer savvy and see a CMMS as an integral part of their maintenance. With a CMMS, it’s much easier to organize your maintenance goals, create a plan and see that it’s implemented throughout your company. Involving the maintenance department in the design process will benefit with their experience and interest in the strategy.
There are many benefits that a CMMS can offer your maintenance department and your company:
- Organizing planned and predictive maintenance,
- Tracking corrective maintenance,
- Streamlining purchasing procedures,
- Improving inventory control,
- Reducing repair costs,
- Reducing downtime and much more.
To view and measure these benefits, CMMS programs are offering more and more analytics tools in different forms.
As your CMMS is continually updated by your maintenance department, it’s gathering important data such as asset downtime, employee time, parts usage, costs, sensor readings, etc. This data can then be analyzed and compared using reports, KPIs and analytics. With a solid strategy for your goals and objectives, you can decide which types of metrics are most necessary.
You can generate reports to view the cost history of assets in a certain building or see which parts need to be reordered. With KPIs, you can see the OEE (Overall Equipment Efficiency) or see a graph of the mean time between failures. And there are now analytics tools such as AskSteve, a chatbot which allows you to speak directly to your history data in order to extract visible results. These analytics can also help gain insight into your data in order to develop predictive maintenance.
Like a machine, your maintenance department is an important asset made of many parts that are working together to ensure the smooth operation of your facility. The maintenance team, along with CMMS and analytics tools, needs to have goals and strategies in place in order to preserve the safety of your technicians, lifespan of your equipment and the efficiency of your buildings.
