The new year is rapidly approaching, what better time than now to start evaluating how your current system is performing and start preparing your maintenance operations for the New Year.
Start by assessing if your current maintenance management system is meeting your objectives and giving you and your organization the critical data needed to make good business decisions. Then review and assess what your needs are to make your maintenance operations more efficient. Now is the time to establish your needs, set your goals and objectives, and invest in a maintenance management system that will help exceed your goals.
When you are evaluating your current maintenance operations, ask yourself these questions:
Is your data really secure? Does your vendor have a Cyber Security Rating of 100%? With all of the cyber attacks having the wrong vendor managing your data can be devastating to your business.
Is your current system providing you with complete, reliable data to manage your maintenance process?
Does the data include all of the information and detail that you need?
Can you attach drawings, images, and documents?
Can you access your data from anywhere using a computer, Smartphone or mobile device?
Can you keep track of all of your maintenance repair expenses?
Can you access your spare parts inventory from anywhere?
Is your data readily available for inspections?
Once you have taken a look at what processes are working and not working, you want to make the necessary adjustments to your current maintenance processes. Some of the steps that you can take to improve your current processes may include: Read more…
Today many businesses are recovering from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, and other catastrophes. Supply chain disruptions have made us more aware of our dependencies and the things that we don’t even think about because everything is operating so efficiently. Businesses are looking at their processes and what can be done so that they are more prepared for any disaster or disruption that could have an impact on their business operations.
Supply chains are the core of their business; any disruption in their operations can have a major impact on production and delivery processes. It is a fact that maintenance has a major impact on business operations, and they can’t afford to have equipment break down and sit around and wait for parts that may or may not arrive for days or weeks. When production stops and distribution of products get delayed, maintenance teams are scrambling for spare parts, a specialized vendor, or other tasks, to get things fixed and production back up running quickly. This is costing time, money, unhappy customers, and your business.
Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) is the process of managing the maintenance of physical assets and equipment of an organization throughout each asset’s lifecycle. The objective of EAM is to maximize
asset/equipment lifespan, minimize costs, enhance the quality and utilization of assets, increase efficiency, and improve safety.
EAM and CMMS Defined
EAM is frequently associated with a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), but a more intensive glance at EAM versus CMMS uncovers there is a slight distinction.
CMMS is a software solution that manages the maintenance work necessary to extend an asset’s usefulness and profitability.
EAM optimizes an asset’s life cycle in order to decrease the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and at the same time maximizing overall asset productivity and Return on Asset (ROA).
October 2021 With the summer winding down, now is the best time to prepare camps and recreation facilities for the long-dormant winter months ahead. Performing preventive maintenance and completing important fall maintenance tasks now saves a lot of time and aggravation and will make your life easier when you return to reopening in the spring.
Below are a few best practices to consider when preparing your facilities for closing them down before the upcoming winter months. These are just recommendations but the list will vary considerably depending on the type of camp that you have or what part of the country your camp is located in. Having a checklist ensures that everything has been completed and will help make opening day a lot easier.
Cleaning Interior: Offices, Kitchens, Other Rooms, and Electronic Devices
Check furniture, couches, chairs, and benches check in the crevasses, under cushions, and furniture to ensure that there are no food particles.
Any camps that have beds, either for overnight or for sick rooms, dust or sanitize bed frames, side tables, lamps, mirrors, clothes racks, head/footboards, and dressers.
Sick Rooms: Wipe down, disinfectant, and sanitize the room, cabinets, patient bed, etc.
Sick Room: Restock the first-aid kit and other medical supplies that you keep on hand during the year.
Sick Room: Make a checklist of the things you have in stock and keep them in a sealed storage container to avoid any rodents or pest infiltration.
Wipe down and sanitize door handles, doors, and window frames.
As the size of your company grows, adding additional employees and the expense of investing in assets and equipment to keep your company operating is now more challenging. Along with the growth of your company and organization come additional responsibilities of managing all of your assets, resources and keeping everything running at peak performance.
In order to keep up with your competitors and your growing maintenance tasks, you are now at a point where you need to assess the efficiency of your current maintenance operations. Gone are the days of trying to manage your facility using multiple spreadsheets, trying to merge all of the information, extract duplicate data, and validate that the information is current. Trying to keep and manage checklists and tasks using paper and pencil has now become more of a struggle in this technology-driven world.
Where do you begin the task of evaluating and finding the right solution to automate and simplify your maintenance operations, and is it within your budget? With all of the maintenance software available in the market today, what will work best for you? There are so many options and things to consider.
To help you make the right decision this guide will give you an understating of what maintenance management is and provide you with some of the most important things to consider in helping you during your selection process.
What Is Maintenance Management?
Maintenance management is the process and procedure for maintaining a company’s assets, equipment, and resources. The purpose of maintenance management is to ensure that production proceeds efficiently and resources are used effectively. The overall business objective is to more efficiently schedule work, manage costs, prolong the lifespan of assets, and ensure that processes are followed to comply with all regulations.
How Can Maintenance Management Help Your Business?
All businesses, throughout all industries, need to maintain assets, reduce equipment downtime, increase productivity, reduce costs, and work more efficiently. Implementingcomputerized maintenance management system (CMMS)software can help:
Streamline company processes and protect assets.
Minimize the risk of machines breaking down.
Control expenses due to better management of parts inventory.
Maximize asset lifespan due to proper maintenance.
Help keep equipment running at peak performance.
Less disruption to production, work environments, etc.
Increase the safety of employees due to the proper maintenance of equipment.
Maintenance management software, such asCMMS, centralizes the storage of information to help organizations be more prepared for inspections and audits.
What Are the Types of Maintenance Management?
Reactive maintenance, also known as the run-to-failure strategy, is performed when assets are deliberately operated until they break down.
Preventive maintenanceis regularly scheduled inspections and maintenance done to help minimize the possibility of unexpected failures of equipment and reduce repair costs.
Predictive maintenanceis a condition-based approach that monitors the condition of assets using sensor devices and provides warnings to maintenance managers when an equipment failure might occur.
Condition-based maintenance is a condition-based approach that monitors the condition of assets and relies only on real-time sensor measurements. Once a parameter reaches an unacceptable level, maintenance workers are dispatched. This means that condition-based maintenance systems perform work only at the time it is needed.
Reliability centered maintenance is a method of analyzing breakdowns to identify which maintenance methods will work best for each piece of machinery.
Why Is Maintenance Management Important?
Without maintenance management, there can be significant 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.
For any organization, maintenance backlogs play an important role in determining the reliability of an equipment’s operating condition, the efficiency of an organization’s maintenance plan, and the major areas of improvement in an organization’s maintenance operations. Maintenance backlogs are tasks that are ready to be done, such as preventive maintenance routines, predictive maintenance tasks, to corrective maintenance work. These tasks are critical to any business because they help to prevent safety issues, breakdowns, failures, or damage that could put you, your equipment, or your workers in danger. We all know that a certain level of maintenance backlog is inevitable, but neglecting these tasks can lead to more breakdowns, asset downtimeand a major disruption to your business operations.
Below are some tips to give you a better understanding of what a maintenance backlog is, why it’s important, and what you can do to help you manage your work order backlog.
Maintenance management is the core of your business. Not managed right it can cost you a lot of time, money, and sometimes your business. The maintenance management experience today is very different from that of spreadsheets, notebooks, pencils and paper. With the centralization and mobility of data, businesses are looking at a web-based Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) to manage their maintenance operations.
No matter what size business or organization you have, the number of locations, or where in the world you are located, companies have similar goals:
Schedule maintenance tasks and activities, maintain historical records, and keep track of work completed.
Store all data such as work orders, history, manuals, etc., in one centralized location, and have the ability to access the information at any time from any location, via computer, smartphone, or mobile device.
Generate desired reports.
Implement a program where all of the users are comfortable using the solution.
Protection against cybersecurity.
Why you need a maintenance management software?
Without maintenance management, there can be significant 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.
What is the best maintenance management solution?
Moving from spreadsheets, paper and pencils is a big step. Adopting computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software is the first step towards streamlining and making maintenance operations at your facility cheaper, more effective, and more efficient.More on effective maintenance management.
If you would like a better understanding of CMMS software you can read this article on “What is a CMMS”.
Maintenance costs are a significant part of an organization’s budget and are usually the first department that encounters cuts. Cutting costs is only part of the solution, organizations have to work smarter and look at more innovative ways to work more efficiently and boost their return on investment.
Reducing maintenance costs is not just looking for places to cut costs; it is finding creative ways to make your investments deliver better returns.
Some ways to reduce maintenance costs include:
Getting Rid of Spreadsheets
If you are still managing your maintenance and facilities operations using spreadsheets this can be costing you more money than you think! A lot of organizations start out by managing their maintenance and facilities using spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are part of a standard computer software package and are easily available. As businesses grow, keeping ahead of the competition, spreadsheets may not be the most effective way to keep up with the complicated demands of managing operations.
Spreadsheets take a lot of processing time and analysis of data, risks of errors are extremely high and are not suited for mobility, which affects team productivity and the reliability of the data.
Reduce Reactive Maintenance
Reactive maintenance also referred to as breakdown or corrective maintenance is performed only when the equipment has failed. This means no regular maintenance or repairs have been scheduled or planned to reduce breakdowns. This means that technicians may be spending a lot of hours doing reactive maintenance instead of proper planning. Equipment breakdown wastes a lot of time, slows down production and is costing you money.
Inspections are a very important part of your business. Ensuring the safety and protection of your workers and meeting compliance standards can be frustrating and complex. Trying to get everything organized and prepared for safe quality food (SQF) EPA audits, OSHA and other inspections means a lot of work and a lot of your time trying to prepare.
With the increase in regulations, safety, etc., audits and inspections are not the same as they were in the past. Having an employee walk through the department with a spreadsheet looking for signs of problems is no longer efficient. Trying to manage processes and keeping everything organized and under control requires more than a spreadsheet, pencil and paper.
Having everything stored in and accessible in a centralized system has lots of benefits and makes preparing for inspections and audits a lot easier and less challenging. A computer maintenance management system (CMMS), can help you to easily organize, store, and quickly access audit-related documents in one centralized system and create detailed reports instantly to help show that you meet inspection and audit requirements. All of this can be done from a computer, smartphone or mobile device. And anyone on the team can do this no one needs to be an expert. It is that easy. Read more….
