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….
The Cannabis industry is rapidly growing and is struggling through processes, regulations, and compliance. This industry depends on reliable, highly powerful equipment, intensity lighting, humidity control, and more to grow and process cannabis plants. The demand to manage all of the assets, equipment, the entire maintenance operations, being prepared for inspections, and meeting compliance regulations (FDA, etc.) is challenging. Managing all of the equipment, tasks and processes requires a maintenance management system that can keep up with the speed that this industry is encountering. They face many challenges to meet with the growth and the innovative technology, meet specific requirements and deliver safe products to the end-user. Read more…
To most people, “the cloud” may seem incomprehensible—it sounds like maybe a magical bank in the sky for data. While that image is far from the truth, the cloud certainly does offer some—if not magical, at least remarkable—benefits.
“The cloud. We’ve all heard the term thrown about in recent years,” says Roy Whelan, solutions director of SmartOffice. Whelan explains cloud computing means storing data on remotely accessible servers hosted on the internet. “This means businesses can manage data in a shared space and can access data from any location, not just from a local server.”
Before cloud computing, companies needed to invest in on-site servers to store their data, Whelan explains. This could get expensive with the physical requirements of the servers as they need space, physical hardware, software and maintenance, as well as an in-house IT team you’d need to manage them.
Cloud computing offers companies the chance to utilize virtual storage space on the internet. But the benefits keep building from there. If you are interested in cloud computing, read on! We asked business leaders and professionals in technology to share some of the benefits of cloud computing
7 Potential Benefits of cloud computing you should know about
1. Cost
“For me, one of the biggest reasons to switch to the cloud is cost,” says Greg Dickens, founder of Epilocal. “With the cloud, you are only paying for server time you use, rather than having to invest lots of money up-front to run your own servers, so there’s a big cash-flow benefit there,” Dickens emphasizes that, for smaller companies and start-ups, removing that initial barrier of in-house servers can make a huge difference in their ability to compete.
A growing cloud trend, serverless architecture can further compound the savings in cloud computing, according to Dickens. “Serverless architecture deconstructs cloud servers to their absolute minimum: individual functions. So now, rather than having to rent cloud servers for the time you use them, you can rent individual functions instead.”
2. Scalability
Cloud computing is cost-effective and efficient for big businesses and small businesses alike because it allows you to pay for what you use. “Cloud computing plans allow businesses to scale their data usage and computing power up or down depending on their needs and budget,” says Sebastian Schaeffer, CTO and owner of dofollow.io. Using what you need and adjusting as you go is more flexible than investing in hardware, Schaeffer points out, and many companies desire that flexibility.
For example, think of the start-up example above. If cloud computing didn’t exist, they’d have a much tougher time determining how much should be invested in infrastructure—do you tie up resources in overshooting your current needs in anticipation of growth? Incrementally add on as needed while potentially disrupting operations? Cloud computing makes these questions much easier to navigate.
3. Accessibility
Think of the sharing and collaborating capacities of platforms like Google Drive™, Dropbox® or Microsoft Teams®, and you’ll have an idea of how much the accessibility of cloud computing has revolutionized work. Cloud-based technology allows people to collaborate on the same items from anywhere, updating in real time.
“This increases productivity and efficiency due to the reduction of phone calls and unnecessary trips to gather information,” says Jeff Roscher, CEO of eWorkOrders. He points out that streamlining these processes makes work easier and faster, increasing productivity and potential profits.
As maintenance teams are preparing for the reopening ofschools and universities, they face new guidelines and challenges to ensure the safety of our children. These new guidelines and regulations bring new facility management protocols, upgrades to building systems, and the task of managing multiple vendors to ensure that the buildings are kept clean and safe.
Reducing the Transmission of Viruses
The Campus Safety and COVID-19: Clery Act Requirement Act in 2020 set stricter guidelines in keeping schools and campuses safe. Facility managers play a crucial role in ensuring that these new guidelines are met and...Read more
Downtime is a genuine danger to any manufacturing business. One of the most feared situations inside an assembling plant is that on the off chance that one area backs up, it can have a compounding effect on different areas that are waiting for parts to complete processes. Waiting for parts to complete jobs is costing you money. The longer it takes to complete these jobs, the more money it is costing you. The overall objective is to increase efficiency and reduce the amount of time that people or machines are sitting idle. An operational error, poor equipment maintenance, broken hardware or software, and various other things can escalate downtime to dangerous levels.
To help reduce losses, there are some steps that can be taken to help minimize downtime.Read more…
