Has working remotely made managing your maintenance operations more challenging?
The COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly changed the way that organizations are doing business today. Even though the shutdown, every organization still needs to deal with maintenance, maintaining assets and facilities, and other related activities. Managing maintenance and facilities operations remotely has now become even more of a necessity, and organizations are discovering their current processes can’t stand up to the new demands. No one knows the long-term impact that the COVID-19 pandemic will have on business operations. But, now is the time to take a look at how you can streamline and strengthen processes and procedures to work more efficiently and be prepared for any future disruptions in business operations.
Being able to manage your facilities and maintenance operations remotely from anywhere, with access to real-time information on the status of your operations is critical.
Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) is affordable software that can organize and manage all of these important tasks, helping reduce costs, manage inventory, reduce downtime, and provide you with real-time status reports and dashboards. Whether you are working from home, or out in the field, managing your work orders, assets, and maintenance tasks can easily be done through a computer, smartphone, or mobile device.
What is CMMS?
Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) software gives maintenance managers the tools to manage an organization’s maintenance operation, work orders, assets, equipment, preventive maintenance, inventory, workflows, safety compliance, teams, expenses, and other processes.
CMMS Mobile – Access to Your Data from Anywhere
While accessing and managing your CMMS information from a computer is easy, you still need to get the information out to the technicians in the field. Today with the additional limitations of social distancing, technicians running in and out of a facility is not the answer. With CMMS mobile technicians can access all of the information stored in their CMMS easily from a computer, smartphone, or mobile device. CMMS mobile access gives them the ability to view and manage work orders, upload images, see asset history, manage inventory and more, no matter where they are located.
CMMS Comprehensive Set of Features & Functionality
Every CMMS vendor may offer different tools/features. Some standard CMMS features include work orders, service requests (work requests), preventative maintenance, asset management, document management, spare parts, labor management and time tracking, inventory management, mobile, reporting, and dashboards. These features give maintenance managers the tools to effectively stay on top of all of your organization’s maintenance needs and stay within budgets.
1. Work Order Management
Work orders are documents (paper or digital) for maintenance work that needs to be scheduled and completed. Managing work orders through CMMS software, technicians have access to additional information and documents to help them perform their tasks to complete the job. Work orders can track information such as labor expenses, materials issued from inventory, spot buys, and other expenses incurred for the job.
2. Service Requests (Work Requests)
A Service Request is a user-friendly interface that provides users an easy way to submit maintenance requests 24/7 from anywhere. The Service Request interface gives users the ability to monitor the status of their request as maintenance workers complete the repairs. The automatic assignment of work orders to the appropriate technician reduces the number of phone calls, emails, and disruptions to maintenance teams.
3. Preventive Maintenance
Preventive maintenance is the scheduling of routine maintenance on a piece of equipment to help keep it running at peak performance, preventing any unplanned downtime and unexpected costs from unanticipated equipment failure. Preventive maintenance is scheduled and performed while the equipment is still working to reduce unexpected breakdowns. CMMS provides tools to effectively manage, plan, and schedule preventive maintenance tasks. Vendors offer several ways of managing schedules, the most popular is the calendar view, where you can click to drill down to the actual work order details.
4. Enterprise Asset Management
Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) feature helps businesses manage, organize, and track the lifecycle of assets across all facilities, departments, business units, and geographical areas throughout the lifecycle of each asset. EAM is very important in the tracking of completed and assigned tasks and records pertaining to the maintenance history of assets, which makes it easier for organizations to provide authorities with needed documentation for compliance.
5. Document Management
Document management within a CMMS is used to store historical data on equipment, repair logs, manuals, regulatory files, before and after pictures of jobs, pictures of equipment, material safety data sheets (MSDS) sheets, certificates of insurance (COI), warranty cards, and more. The real-time sharing of information improves the quality of work from your team while simultaneously improving their efficiency.
6. Spare Parts Inventory Management
Spare parts inventory management is the planning of having the right stock of parts available while keeping the cost of inventory parts and supplies at a minimum. With CMMS software you can set minimum and maximum inventory stock levels so that when the minimum quantity is reached a purchase order will automatically be generated to send to vendors for replenishment. It will also allow you to evaluate how often and how many of each part is being used so that you can set appropriate minimums and maximums. Having the right parts in inventory reduces the time-consuming task of trying to locate hard to find parts, additional shipping costs, and equipment downtime.
7. Labor Management & Time Tracking
Managing vendors, employees, and tracking time are all critical components in effectively managing maintenance operations. CMMS gives managers the ability to track their work order time, vacations, sick time, breaks, payroll, and billing information. Users can also store information on certifications, training, licenses, and any other pertinent information. Workers can log the number of hours they worked on a project directly on the work order, making it easier to track and calculate total labor costs for a particular job. Through maintenance history reports, managers get real-time information on utilization rates, response times, and work that has been completed.
8. Mobile
Using CMMS on a mobile device gives team members the ability to access, track, and manage all of their information while on-the-go. With mobile CMMS technicians can edit tasks, upload images, view, edit and close out work orders, log labor hours and notes, access inventory, enter condition monitoring readings, in real-time anywhere in the field. Barcoding technology empowers your team to use their mobile device to scan barcodes on parts/equipment to record inventory transactions or pull up equipment details right on the job site.
9. Reporting
A good CMMS gives managers the power to review the data they have been collecting into meaningful reports. These reports provide visibility into operations, which can highlight key gaps and areas for improvement. Reports may be as simple as pulling a list of work orders completed in a timeframe or assessing costs.
10. Dashboards & Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are a significant measurement of the overall success of an organization. CMMS software transforms your real-time data and displays the information into an easy-to-read graphical dashboard. Managers can setup and customize dashboards to meet their organization’s needs. Viewing daily information gives managers the ability to see how well their maintenance organization is doing. The dashboard may be set as the default screen so that it loads when the user logs in or added to a toolbar, giving users easy access to view the status of their maintenance organization.
These are just the top 10 most popular features that most CMMS vendors provide. At eWorkOrders, we offer additional features and functions that are beneficial to any size company throughout any industry.
Conclusion
Maintenance management is the core of your business. Without maintenance management, there can be delays in products and services, disruption to business operations, and an increase in expenses. Maintenance management helps companies organize and manage time and costs, to ensure the efficiency of processes and procedures while maintaining resources and controlling costs.
CMMS software provides organizations with powerful tools to effectively access and manage their maintenance operations from anywhere. During this COVID-19 pandemic, organizations currently using CMMS software to manage their maintenance operations saw little disruption with the management of their processes. CMMS software gave them the ability to continue to manage and access their information, prioritize work orders, resources, and get real-time status reports no matter where they were located. As work was completed and updated within CMMS, the information could be extracted easily for inspections.
eWorkOrders CMMS software solution provides all of these features and more. As your company expands and needs additional features, our software solution grows with you. Our Enterprise offer provides higher-end customers with those specialized solutions that require more in-depth analysis and customization.
