Maintenance Management Blog - Features, Tips & Resources

6 Ways CMMS/ Maintenance Software Can Improve Vendor Management

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Replacing equipment that fails unexpectedly can be very expensive not only in terms of costs incurred but also in lost revenue and opportunity cost. This makes it crucial that maintenance is properly done so as to extend the equipment’s operational life as much as possible. Effectively managing maintenance spare parts and supplies is one of the ways to ensure this.

      The lowest cost supplier may not be the best and the supplier of the highest quality parts may not be the best because of high costs or their ability to deliver when you need the parts and supplies. You need to have some way of keeping vendor information and tracking what you buy from them. Most CMMS/ maintenance management software also help you manage vendor information for equipment spares and other maintenance supplies.

Six Ways CMMS/ Maintenance Software Can Make Vendor Management Easier

1. They can store information on the vendor such as whom to order parts from, who provides maintenance on equipment you purchased, whom to contact if you have problems with the vendor and so on.
   
   
2. They can allow you to rate the vendor so that you can select the best vendor when you need to order parts or supplies.
   
   
3. They have reports where you can calculate how much you spent on different vendors over the year. Sometimes consolidating purchases with particular vendors can get you better prices and service.
   
   
4. If they have a purchase order module in the software you should be able to link vendor information with purchases and see how they are doing in terms of costs, quality and delivery on time.
   
   
5. They can help you identify two or three vendors for particular parts and supplies. This may not always be possible especially for specialized parts for special equipment. Having alterative vendors for different parts makes you less dependent on a particular vendor – this can become important if vendors decide to raise prices, part quality drops or deliveries keep getting delayed.
   
   
6. If you decide to drop a vendor you can check what equipment they supplied, parts & spares they supply as well as any outstanding purchase orders. This will make it easier to identify a substitute vendor without creating operational problems when transitioning to a new vendor.

CMMS/ Maintenance Software Selection Guide

If you currently do not have a suitable CMMS/ maintenance software package, you may be find our maintenance management software selection guide helpful. It gives you a checklist of different selection criteria that you can use to identify the right CMMS/ maintenance software for your needs. There are hundreds of packages available suitable for different requirements – using the guide can help you narrow the field and select the right one for your organization.

Are you doing too much preventive maintenance management?

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At some point you may be asked by management or other departments if the amount of preventive maintenance you are doing is too much. Maybe equipment is frequently unavailable because of planned preventative maintenance. Or your maintenance team is complaining because they have to spend too much time checking equipment or performing preventative maintenance chores.

      Depending on your work order backlog and who is complaining you probably should take these complaints seriously or not! Questions by management and operations need to be properly answered. Complaints by your maintenance team may point to underlying problems that may require more education or a review of the work being done. How do you know when to take these seriously?

1. Are other departments complaining frequently of lack of equipment availability causing customer complaints or production issues? If you get this a lot you should review Equipment Maintenance Calendars in your CMMS software (maintenance management software) with the responsible people from the other departments (see related post on Equipment Maintenance Calendars). You may find that rescheduling work or moving it around may reduce many complaints.
   
   
2. Is management complaining? This is usually because costs seem to be running high or they do not understand the benefits of preventive maintenance. Items like this can be addressed by reviewing the cost of equipment downtime. What happens if the equipment on which much preventive maintenance is being done fails? If you have historical data from your CMMS software you can see how preventive maintenance has reduced the costs of unplanned/ breakdown maintenance. Being able to compare costs from prior periods can be helpful. (see related post on Auditing Your Maintenance Management Program).
   
   
3. Complaints from maintenance personnel may have some justification. Review manufacturer recommendations and see if some preventive maintenance can be reduced or done by being rolled up with other preventive maintenance tasks. Review maintenance task instructions and see if they can be simplified. Discuss with maintenance personnel to find why the believe some preventive maintenance may be unnecessary. They may have useful suggestions that enable you to roll up two or more maintenance tasks into one reducing the time & costs!

Analysis & Collection Of Maintenance Data

As outlined above you are going to need to be able to review and analyze a lot of your work order data to provide justifications or make improvements. This is where good CMMS/ maintenance software can be quite useful. If you currently do not have a suitable CMMS/ maintenance software product, you may be find our maintenance management software selection guide helpful. It gives you a checklist of different selection criteria that you can use to identify the right CMMS/ maintenance software for your needs. With hundreds of CMMS software products available finding the one that will suit your needs can be a challenge!

CMMS/ Maintenance Software – Setup Tips For First Time Users

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New Maintenance Management Software Package. Now How Do I Setup The System!

It can be quite a challenge setting up a CMMS/ maintenance software system for the first time especially if you do not already have an existing maintenance software package (migrating from an existing package has its own challenges!). Organizations frequently have been using paper and pencil or spreadsheets to keep track of maintenance due before deciding on buying a maintenance management software package. After buying a maintenance software package you now have to plan on how to set it up so that your maintenance team can transition seamlessly to the new system.

8 Steps To Setup Your CMMS/ Maintenance Software

1. Create your list: Go through all your facilities and equipment to get a list of all the equipment & facilities you wish to maintain. While this need not be an exhaustive list of everything you have, it should be quite comprehensive and have the major items that need maintenance. You can always add to this list at a later date.
   
   
2. Categorize your list: Group the equipment & facilities into different types e.g. “HVAC” (Heating, Ventilation & Air Conditioning), “Pumps”, “Vehicles”, etc. Sub-group them based them on similar maintenance required e.g. HVAC compressors, sewage pumps, forklifts, etc.
   
   
3. Identify your maintenance work: Once you have the different sub-groups identified by type of maintenance required, you can start identifying the different types of maintenance tasks each sub-group requires – both planned/ preventative maintenance as well as unplanned/ breakdown maintenance.
   
   
4. Who is doing maintenance? Identify you maintenance personnel, their skills and the calendars they may work on (e.g. Day shift, Night shift, etc.). Enter this information into the CMMS software.
   
   
5. Define maintenance tasks: Expand each maintenance task to identify frequency (e.g. weekly/ monthly, based on a meter, unplanned, etc.), how it is done (best practices), spares & supplies required, people required and time required. This will allow you to calculate costs & identify dependencies.
   
   
6. Identify the most critical equipment & facilities– items whose breakdown/ unavailability will cause major problems. Similarly identify the most critical tasks - tasks if not done will cause major maintenance failures. Start entering data into the CMMS/ maintenance software for the most critical equipment, facilities and maintenance tasks. Many maintenance packages should be able to import a lot of data from spreadsheets or text files.
   
   
7. Start: Begin using the CMMS/ maintenance software system. Keep entering more data as you go along.
   
   
8. Check regularly: Periodically review system statistics to see how you are doing. You should start seeing improvements in work order backlog, reduction in unplanned maintenance and more planned/ preventative maintenance.

Selecting CMMS/ Maintenance Management Software

While we have addressed the part about setting up CMMS software for your maintenance management program, finding the right CMMS/ maintenance software in the first place can also be a challenge. There are hundreds of systems available. You can download our free maintenance management software selection guide. It gives you a checklist of different selection criteria that can help you identify the right one for your needs.

Role Of The Maintenance Planner In Maintenance Management Programs

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What does the maintenance planner do?

The maintenance planner has many responsibilities chief among them being to plan and schedule maintenance work. The planner also needs to make sure that spare parts and supplies are available to complete planned maintenance work as well as the technicians are available to do the work. The maintenance/ operations manager could have the responsibility of being the maintenance planner but frequently this is a function done by someone else who reports to the maintenance/ operations manager. On large sites with multiple facilities you could have multiple maintenance planners each responsible for specific facilities or areas.

What are the challenges faced by the maintenance planner?

One of the biggest challenges of the maintenance planner is unexpected equipment breakdowns that frequently get priority to be fixed. This delays/ reschedules other maintenance work resulting in further maintenance backlog. The job of the maintenance planner can be quite hard to do without the right tools.  One of the best tools to help manage both the unplanned and preventative maintenance work to be done is computerized maintenance management software (CMMS software). CMMS/ maintenance software offer a variety of features that can help make the job of the maintenance planner easier.

Some CMMS/ maintenance software benefits for the maintenance planner

1. A way to create a library/ template of all different types of maintenance tasks – both unplanned and preventative maintenance. This helps to standardize best practices and make it easy to generate work orders as needed since much information can be copied from the task template onto the work order.
   
   
2. Reminders when work orders are due and an ability to track past due work orders.
   
   
3. They offer a variety of statistics that can be useful to show to upper management to understand the “health” of the maintenance system. Changes in certain parameters can give warnings of potential issues e.g. a continually increasing work order backlog.
   
   
4. A variety of reports that can be shared or provided to other groups e.g. maintenance calendars to help schedule maintenance work with production/ operations, equipment history reports with maintenance costs & parts used, availability checking to find future part & resource (technician) requirements for scheduled maintenance.

What sort of responsibilities does the maintenance planner have?

The planner should be able to show that maintenance issues are not affecting operations/ production or causing other losses or delays. Equipment downtime should be within limits. Secondly maintenance costs are not spiraling out of control. Ideally you should be seeing a reduction in unplanned/ breakdown work and an increase in planned/ preventative maintenance once the maintenance planner starts working. Spare part costs can also be significant especially when holding spares and supplies that are not needed for some time. The maintenance planner should be able to do some amount of “just in time” inventory planning for such items. It is important to cultivate good relationships with a select group of vendors who are able to demonstrate an ability to supply reasonably priced and acceptable quality spares and supplies with short notice. The CMMS/ maintenance software should be able to generate Planning reports for future periods that can give you an idea of spares and supplies that will be consumed on preventive/ planned maintenance in the near future. Having the ability to specify reorder limits on parts also makes it possible to keep an eye on parts that need to be reordered as work orders are completed. Maintenance planners also need to ensure that the skill levels of technicians doing the maintenance work are adequate – they may need to identify training needs and schedule them as required.

CMMS/ maintenance software - an important tool for the maintenance planner

Maintenance management software/ CMMS software is an important tool in the arsenal of the maintenance planner. Use of a CMMS software package makes it a lot easier to plan, schedule, track, report and analyse all the maintenance work done. If you are looking for a CMMS/ maintenance software program you can download and try out a fully functional 30-day trial of FastMaint CMMS Maintenance Management.

Maintenance Management - 5 Ways To Improve Work Order Estimates

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Poor work order time & material estimates can be an expensive headache!

When there are several different maintenance tasks to do every day, it is quite important to estimate how much time each work order will take. Underestimating the time required will frequently result in over time, maintenance team burnout and dropped work orders. This will get the maintenance team quite a bad reputation and they will be seen as ineffective! Maintenance team burnout will result in high turnover of your maintenance technicians. Hiring new people to replace them will further compound the problems since newly hired replacements will not yet be familiar with many of the jobs and procedures and will take more time doing them. Having too much overtime will add costs to your maintenance budget. Hence it is important to have a good idea how much time each type of maintenance task will take and to schedule work appropriately.

How to improve your maintenance management estimates

1. List all the different types of maintenance tasks you do – both planned/ preventative as well as unplanned/ breakdown work. You should have an idea of how much each of these tasks will take if there are no unexpected problems. Besides this you should know the spares & supplies as well as the technicians/ skills you will need. A good CMMS/ maintenance management software program can help you create such a listing.
   
   
2. The CMMS/ maintenance software could use your maintenance task definitions as templates to create work orders. It could also use the estimates of time, people & parts to give you an idea of what work can be completed in a regular working day. Planning reports will help you properly schedule work orders and detect possible schedule conflicts (someone needs to work on two different work orders at the same time) as well as possible spare part shortages.
   
   
3. Check the CMMS/ maintenance software reports and compare work order estimated time vs. actual time spent. Occasionally you may see major variations because of unexpected problems. However, in general you should see a close match between the estimates and actual time taken if you have estimated the size the job correctly. Over estimates can be bad too – since it means that you will plan for less work than you are able to. So if you see much variance between the estimates and the actual time, check and see why this is happening and update the estimates accordingly. Doing this on a periodic basis will over time give much more reliable estimates on how much work is involved in doing most maintenance tasks.
   
   
4. Try to get work order estimated times to a day or less. Avoid having multi-day work orders. For very large jobs that may take several days you  can try to break them up into smaller work orders and chain them one after another (e.g. completion of one work order will schedule the next one). Having a finer granularity of task estimates makes it easier to pinpoint areas which can produce estimation problems as well as identify critical paths (a problem here will delay all other work).
   
   
5. Estimates should be based on the time taken for a technician of average skill not on time it would take a highly experienced technician. If you have many inexperienced technicians you may need to add additional time. This time can be reduced as the technicians become more skilled and familiar with their jobs. 

Using CMMS/ maintenance software for estimates

CMMS/ maintenance software makes it much easier to collect and manage estimates. You can define the tasks in the CMMS/ maintenance software and adjust the estimates over time. It should be possible to chain tasks together so that you do not end up with very large multi-day work orders that can make estimation difficult. Reports from the CMMS software can be used to compare actual vs. estimated values. If you are looking for a CMMS/ maintenance software program you can download and try out a fully functional 30-day trial of FastMaint CMMS Maintenance Management.

Maintenance Budget Cuts? Use CMMS Software Data To Get More Budget Instead

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The maintenance budget is a big and tempting target!

Maintenance management is normally a labor intensive and capital intensive process. Significant labor must be spent in doing the actual maintenance work, employee training and retention. Besides the cost of such labor there are significant expenses associated with purchasing and stocking spare parts and maintenance supplies. It is no wonder that E.I. DuPont de Nemours Co. (Delaware) reported that "The largest, single controllable expenditure in a plant is maintenance, and in many plants the maintenance budget exceeds annual net profit." (1996). Considering the size of maintenance budgets there is frequently a need for maintenance managers to justify increases or keeping the budgets at the same level as last year. The current economic climate makes this task harder.

What are the signs that your maintenance budget may be inadequate?

1. A big maintenance backlog: One very significant number will be the size of your maintenance backlog – normally measured in hours or weeks. The maintenance backlog represents maintenance work that has not yet been done – typically preventative maintenance work that keeps getting rescheduled or delayed because you do not have the time or money to complete it.
   
   
2. Too much rework: Another indicator is rework – how many work orders had problems or required new work orders to be issued to get a job completed correctly. Too much rework indicates either inadequate training of maintenance technicians or poor maintenance practices (use of inferior parts & supplies, preventive maintenance not done, improper work order instructions, etc.).
   
   
3. Lots of overtime: The third indicator is overtime – if you are seeing too much overtime it means that maintenance technicians have too much to do or are taking much longer than expected on maintenance work (a sign of inadequate training or poor maintenance practices).
   
   

How to justify a budget increase

Your CMMS/ maintenance management software can give you reports and statistics on these conditions and help you identify actions you need to take. So if you see signs of any of the above in your maintenance program it may be time to increase the maintenance budget to hire more maintenance personnel, spend more on training or improve spare parts management (find better vendors, keep more items in stock and so on). How can one justify such budget increases to senior management? Ultimately it boils down to the opportunity cost – the cost of lost production and the inability to serve customers satisfactorily. If you can quantify such costs it can go a long way in helping you get the necessary budget approvals. Work with your operations team and other departments to get an idea of impact of maintenance issues on them. Having the numbers and being able to pinpoint the causes and fixes necessary will make it easier to get the funds you need. 

The importance of CMMS/ maintenance software data

To get useful results you will need to be able to collect a lot of data for analysis. This is where a good CMMS/ maintenance management software package is very useful. If you are looking for a CMMS/ maintenance software program you can download and try out a fully functional 30-day trial of FastMaint CMMS Maintenance Management.

CMMS Software Tip: Why You Need An Equipment Maintenance Calendar

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Complex planning required!

With several different types of equipment it can be hard to figure out the best times to schedule preventative maintenance. Some maintenance may take several days to complete causing issues with operations/ production who need the equipment to be available and functioning. Several periods during the year can be bad because they are peak production times, seasonally busy or busy due to planned customer deliveries. Besides this even if the equipment may be idle after hours because it is not used throughout the day, you need to make sure it is back up and functioning at the start of a new day. All this can result in the need for some fairly complex planning!

How an equipment maintenance calendar can help

A good way to manage all this complexity is by putting together an equipment maintenance calendar which shows you which equipment is scheduled for preventive maintenance and when it is scheduled. This also allows you to schedule multiple preventive maintenance tasks on a machine at the same time or close together so that all can be accomplished with minimum disruption at idle times. In many seasonal operations or manufacturing plants there are shutdown times that may last for a few days during the holidays or can be a few months (e.g. for an amusement park operation). This is usually a very good time to plan such preventative maintenance activities.

Create the calendar with your CMMS/ maintenance software

Making such a calendar can be made a lot easier using features of your CMMS/ maintenance software. You should be able to define calendars with working hours, off days and seasonal off periods. These calendars can be associated with equipment or maintenance tasks. The software can use such information to help you put together a calendar of preventative maintenance work over several months into the future. You can use these calendars to discuss with operations/ production to see if any work needs to be rescheduled or changed to better suit their needs. You can then go back to the CMMS/ maintenance software and make adjustments to the preventative maintenance task schedules to do schedule adjustments that can accommodate such operational needs. 

Don't have CMMS/ maintenance management software?

If you do not have CMMS/ maintenance software that you can use to create such a calendar you can download and try out a fully functional 30-day trial of FastMaint CMMS for maintenance management.

Track Equipment Availability & Downtime With CMMS Software

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Work order time (duration) is not the same as equipment downtime. Why? Because an equipment may fail at 1 pm and the work order to repair it is scheduled at 3 pm. The technician may do a temporary fix to get the machine running again while he waits for a part to come in stock. The work order is still open. The part comes in the next day and the work order gets completed the next day at 11 am. So the actual equipment downtime may only be from 1 pm to 4 pm and the next day from 10 am to 11 am when the work order is completed. This is about 4 hours of downtime. The actual time spent on the work order is 2 hours (3 pm to 4p m on the first day and 10 am to 11 am the next day).

     Make sure that reports from your CMMS/ maintenance software are not confusing the two. Ideally your CMMS/ maintenance software should have some way to log when an equipment is unavailable and also why it is unavailable. Equipment could be unavailable for a variety of reasons, many of which may have nothing to do with the equipment e.g. power problems, operators no available, assembly line issues, inspections, etc. This way you can separate the different reasons why an equipment is not available and collect actual statistics on downtime due to equipment problems.

       Most new equipment these days have a way to create log files of activity that can be imported into the CMMS/ maintenance software. This makes it easier to collect the information and not depend on operator or maintenance personnel reports for equipment downtime calculation. Check the equipment manufacturer’s documentation to see if it is possible to have the equipment automatically export these logs (ideally as simple text files) to a common folder on your computer network. Once all these files are being regularly collected you can have your CMMS/ maintenance software regularly import them in. You may need to do some customization/ changes to these export files since each equipment manufacturer may have their own export format. Your IT Department may be able to help you create procedures convert all these different formats to a single standard format that your CMMS/ maintenance software or other analysis software can use.

How useful is equipment downtime information?

Being able to review equipment downtime information can help you identify potential causes that may need to be addressed and help reduce future downtime incidents. For example if you see monthly downtime spiking repeatedly for some equipment you will want to investigate why. Reasons could be as varied as improperly trained operators, poor maintenance practices, equipment close to end of its useful life, etc. Critical equipment when not available has effects felt organization wide – production may be lost, quality may suffer and customers may experience delays getting products/ services. Besides reviewing the downtime data you may wish to do some statistical analysis if it is especially critical equipment. Even if the CMMS/ maintenance software does not offer such statistical analysis tools, you may be able to export this data to third-party tools that can do statistical calculations (e.g. a Weibull Failure Analysis).

Looking for CMMS software (maintenance management software)?

Don’t have maintenance software that you can use to get such reports? You can download and try out a fully functional 30-day trial of FastMaint CMMS for maintenance management.

CMMS/ Maintenance Software - Why Are So Many Users Unhappy?

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Many maintenance managers are dissatisfied and feel that they are not properly utilizing their CMMS/ maintenance management software. This is quite surprising considering that in many cases their organizations may have spent thousands of dollars on purchasing the product, training and ongoing maintenance. The CMMS software should work for you – not you for the CMMS software! The following tips can help you select a winner and become a satisfied CMMS customer.

 1)  Avoid runaway selection criteria: In many cases the problems starts up at the selection phase. Selection criteria for purchasing a new CMMS software package should be based on what you can make use of immediately or in the near future – not what everyone thinks you must be able to do. We have seen 30-40 page requests for proposal with literally hundreds of features requested. Considering the amount of work that it would require users to put into the CMMS software you can be quite sure that most of these features will never be used! Others could be nice to have items that are not really workable in practice. For example a requirement that the CMMS software supports a variety of smart phones. It looks like a nice feature, but how many organizations are going to issue their maintenance personnel with smart phones and pay for monthly data plans! If they do, do they have a budget to keep repairing/ replacing them if the phones get damaged when used in industrial environments or someone drops a tool on them? In such cases it really makes sense for the maintenance manager to get involved early in the specification phase and ruthlessly cut out requirements that are not needed for the job.

 2) Be wary when training/ consulting services are offered: Many vendors may offer substantial training on the CMMS software – but requiring a lot of training to use the software should really be a big RED flag! Why? How many maintenance departments have the time and resources to send their maintenance teams for training? Maintenance technicians should get training on doing maintenance related tasks – not spend their time getting training on how to use CMMS software. Another red flag is if a lot of consulting time is being offered. This means that you are going to be spending a lot of time just getting the CMMS system setup. You are also most likely to be spending a lot of money buying additional consulting services.

 3)  Don’t get swept away by great customer reviews/ references: When looking at customer reviews/ testimonials remember that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. So glowing customer testimonials/ references while nice to have should not lead you to the wrong choice. What may be a good work flow/ features for one customer may not work very well for you.

 4)  Try before you buy: Look around for products that you can try out first. You should be able to get a trial period to use a fully functional version of the CMMS software so that you can try it out before you buy it. An added bonus would be if such products allow you to easily convert from the trial to the full version while retaining all the data you already entered.

 5)  Give your feedback: Take the time to provide your feedback & suggestions to the CMMS software vendor. While this may not help you immediately it can help you a lot in the long run. If many customers are requesting particular features – in many cases the software vendor will try to implement them and you will get it in a future release especially if you have also purchased ongoing support & upgrades.

Bottom line look for something that is easy to use and can start helping you right away. Avoid CMMS software products that may have complex work flows and require you to jump through hoops to get things done. This is why getting a trial and trying it out before you buy is essential.

Download The CMMS/ Maintenance Management Software Guide

For a more in-depth review of different selection criteria you can use, download a free guide that can help you evaluate different maintenance software to see how well they will fit your requirements.

Auditing Your Maintenance Management Program – 5 Essential Steps

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Well it’s the start of a New Year! Besides all your other New Year Resolutions, here is another one - do an annual audit of all your maintenance activities for the last year. Though it sounds tedious, it is a good thing to do and can help you identify problem areas, scope for improvement and where you are doing really well.

What Should You Be Doing In The Audit?

1. Collect information on all the work orders you did last year. If you have maintenance management software this will not be hard to do. The software should be able to give you a variety of analysis reports for specific periods so that you can see how you are doing. In addition you may be able to do an export of all work orders for the last year to do more detailed analysis with other tools – e.g. export to a comma delimited file, open with spreadsheet software (such as Microsoft Excel) and do more complex analysis & charting.
   
   
2. Separate unplanned maintenance from planned/ preventative maintenance. Group all the maintenance work that was done into two “buckets” or categories – unplanned/ breakdown maintenance and planned/ preventative maintenance. These are two different types of data and they should be analyzed separately.
   
   
3. Under unplanned work orders look for equipment that seems to be failing frequently or require a lot of unplanned maintenance. This may be a sign that the equipment needs replacement or maintenance is not being done correctly. If problems seem to occur more frequently after certain maintenance team members are doing the maintenance, it may be a sign that the maintenance work is not being done correctly. They may be skipping steps or do not have the training or experience to identify potential issues that will cause future problems. Another clue is if the work orders are being flagged as problem work orders – they are taking too much time to complete or are getting delayed because maintenance technicians are finding additional problems. Another cause could be bad spare parts. If your suppliers are sending parts that fail before their expected life – you are going to see a lot of unexpected maintenance whenever they fail!
   
   
4. Under planned/ preventative maintenance work orders look for the equipment that seems to be taking the most of your time and money. It is possible that the equipment can be replaced with newer equipment that needs less preventive maintenance. Get an idea of how much such equipment is costing you to maintain and see if cheaper alternatives are available. Besides this check and see if some of the preventive maintenance is overkill – review manufacturer’s recommendations and see if you are doing more than is necessary.
   
   
5. Check you maintenance parts usage. Your maintenance software should be able to give you reports of parts you have used over the year. See if you can identify possible bad batches of parts or suppliers who provide poorer quality parts. Identifying bad parts can help you identify equipment that may need pre-emptive maintenance because maintenance was done with bad parts from a bad batch. You can also drop suppliers that tend to sell poor quality parts. Spare part costs are a very significant part of most maintenance budgets and improving parts management can help save a lot of money (and time since you will have less breakdowns because of bad parts).

What You Should Learn From The Audit

At the end of your audit you should have a good idea of potential problem areas, where you can improve and where you are doing well. This kind of information becomes more valuable as you keep repeating these audits – you can see if you are performing better from year to year. While reviews at shorter periods e.g. quarterly or semi-annual are also useful, a yearly audit can help smooth out performance fluctuations caused by seasonal changes. Examples of seasonal changes are equipment running at maximum load to satisfy holiday demand or HVAC issues at the start of winter or summer – these can cause maintenance spikes that can make it hard to compare performance against a prior quarter.

The Importance Of Good CMMS/ Maintenance Management Software

Ultimately to produce useful results you need to be able to collect a lot of data for analysis. This is where good CMMS/ maintenance management software can help – so make sure you have a package that is able to collect and give you back all this data.

If you are looking for a CMMS/ maintenance software program you can download and try out a fully functional 30-day trial of FastMaint CMMS.