Maintenance Management Blog - Features, Tips & Resources

Maintenance Management: CMMS Software Selection Tips

Tweet

 

Maintenance management is quite a wide field since ongoing maintenance is required for a variety of equipment and facilities. Having a CMMS software program that can keep track of such maintenance and schedule work orders becomes very useful. A maintenance software program is not only useful in locations with a lot of machines (e.g. manufacturing plants, mining operations, etc.) but useful where you have a lot of facilities needing maintenance (hotel, resorts, restaurants) as well as those with other equipment (e.g. utilities, vehicle fleets).

Does it make sense to look for software specialized to the type of maintenance requirements you have?

This may not be such a good idea if you are going to be using the same system to handle different types of maintenance e.g. at a manufacturing plant you handle maintenance of machinery as well as facilities (assembly lines, work stations, storage areas) or at a commercial facility you handle maintenance of rooms as well as equipment (HVAC, water pumps, electrical) or say a trucking company wants to handle maintenance of their truck fleet as well as other equipment (e.g. repair equipment) and facilities (e.g. loading docks, repair bays). This means that a product targeted at say fleet maintenance may not offer good facility/ equipment maintenance features. In such cases a more general purpose maintenance management product would be a better choice.

What about integration with other products e.g. an ERP system or accounting system?

A few other software suites, generally ERP systems have maintenance management modules. However, these usually do not have all the features that a CMMS software package will offer. So they can be hard to use and create user dissatisfaction. Some CMMS systems may offer integration with other systems but in all such cases I would recommend buyer beware – make sure the integration is what you want and what you need. These integrations may require you to buy expensive consulting time to setup or do not transfer the correct information between systems. Rather than depending on vendor promises make sure to test such integrations and make sure that they are genuinely useful before deciding to pay a premium for a CMMS software product that offers such integration.

With the advent of a smart mobile phones and tablets does it make sense to look for maintenance software that supports them?

Many maintenance software packages advertise mobile phone features and capabilities. Some features such as the ability to push out work orders to technicians in the field and handle their updates can be quite useful. Others can end up being dangerous – what happens if a technician can modify equipment records, makes changes and drops out of the network due to phone issues? How do you handle lost phones? Who pays for Internet access? You can learn more about these and other questions you need to consider in a related post "Mobile Phone Support In CMMS/ Maintenance Management Software".

How useful are maintenance software reviews?

Quite a few websites and magazines offer reviews or comparisons of different CMMS software. There are a few underlying problems you need to be aware of before you put too much faith in particular reviews. For example you need to consider the target audience the review is for. If your organization/ team is not really a target or does not fall in the solution size range, the review will not be useful. Reviewers conflicts of interest are also a cause of concern. You can learn more about what you need to consider when checking reviews from "CMMS Software Reviews – How Good Are They?".

Maintenance software selection guide

Besides the ones mentioned above a variety of other items need to be considered when selecting CMMS software for an organization e.g. hosted/ self-hosted, number of users, types of reports, scheduling features and so on. To help you consider such items we have put together a “CMMS Software Selection Guide” that you can download and use. It offers a checklist of different criteria that you can use to help you narrow your choice among the hundreds of products currently available.

Analyzing Machine/ Equipment Breakdown Reports From CMMS Software

Tweet

 

As an operations manager or maintenance manager one of the things you need to look out for is problem equipment that is causing operational problems or incurring significant maintenance costs. When you have hundreds of equipment it can be quite difficult to identify equipment that needs to be investigated. This is where equipment breakdown reports or similar reports from your CMMS/ maintenance management software can be helpful.

How to identify problem equipment

1. Maintenance costs by equipment: Use reports from your CMMS software to get an idea of the total maintenance costs for unplanned as well as planned maintenance over preceding twelve months. While looking over a shorter period may be easier, costs will tend to get skewed if any equipment needs specific maintenance only during certain times of the year. Based on costs identify the most expensive equipment. Review the costs to see if anything seems out of line. Consider manufacturers cost estimates and prior years data to see if costs seem unusual.
   
   
2. Equipment downtime duration: Similarly use reports from your CMMS software to look at equipment downtime over the past twelve months. Note that downtime can unusually high for some equipment because it took a long time to fix – maybe parts were not available or maintenance personnel were shifted to higher priority jobs.
   
   
3. Complaints history/ work requests: Look at reported complaints and work requests over the past twelve months. Identify equipment that has an unusual number of complaints or problems.
   
   
4. Equipment statistics (e.g. MTBF, MTTF): While statistics on equipment can be useful they may not be very helpful when you have a variety of different equipment and you are trying to pinpoint equipment that need investigation. However, they can be helpful if you have many similar equipment used in operationally similar ways – any equipment that has statistics way out of line needs to be investigated.
   
   

Identify causes of equipment breakdowns and fixes

Once you have a list of problem equipment you should investigate further on what are the underlying causes. Equipment that breaks down frequently could be failing due to a variety of reasons e.g.

1. Close to end of life: While it may be theoretically possible to keep on using equipment with a lot of ongoing maintenance, at some point it becomes too expensive to continue doing so. Internal metal fatigue, non availability of spare parts, lack of maintenance skills or newer equipment with better productivity/ efficiency are reasons to consider removing equipment. Any equipment in your list that falls into this category probably should be replaced.
   
   
2. Poor maintenance practices: This means that preventive maintenance is being skipped or your maintenance team is inadequately trained to do maintenance on this equipment or poor quality spares are being used. Check if the same spares keep being replaced or maintenance personnel are reporting issues during maintenance using some parts. Identify if preventive maintenance is being skipped. Check work orders to make sure that maintenance procedures are being properly followed. Any equipment in your list that falls into this category probably needs a better preventive maintenance plan or improved training for maintenance personnel. If poor quality spare parts are causing the problems it is time to look for vendors offering better quality.
   
   
3. Poor operational practices: This means that equipment operators are not using the equipment properly or the equipment is not designed for the loads being put on it. Improper operation can be signaled by comments about operator errors in feedback from maintenance technicians. Improved operator training can help here. Equipment that is considered critical and fails frequently even if maintenance was properly done could be a sign of over loading of equipment. You may need to buy additional equipment or look at making changes in operational flow to reduce peak loads.
   
   
4. Poorly designed or built: This means that the equipment has internal flaws that cause it to fail frequently (e.g. over heating because of inadequate cooling). If you have many similar equipment and they all seem to have frequent failures due to the same problem it could be sign of design/ build issues. Do some research to find if other organizations using this equipment are also reporting similar problems. You may need to get the manufacturer to fix these issues or seriously consider buying alternative equipment from another vendor.
   
   
5. Incorrectly installed or setup: The equipment was not installed as per manufacturer’s recommendations or was damaged during installation/ initial startup. This may show up similarly to equipment with poor design/ build, however, it will usually be isolated to only a few equipment out of many similar ones. Also any research you do on other organizations reporting similar problems may not result in many similar complaints about the equipment. Comparing equipment statistics to manufacturers recommendations can also provide clues. Such equipment will need to be inspected and may need a complete re-install.
   
   

Unable to get equipment breakdown reports?

As explained above you will need to collect a lot of data from different reports from your maintenance management software. If you do not have CMMS software or find the reports provided by your existing solution inadequate you can download a fully functional 30-day trial of FastMaint CMMS software. You can use the import feature to import much of your equipment from comma delimited files and try out the different reports to see how to analyze equipment breakdown data.

Key Maintenance Management Statistics For Maintenance Planners

Tweet

 

How to report maintenance program status to management?

This article is a follow on to a previous article "Role Of The Maintenance Planner In Maintenance Management Programs". If you are a maintenance planner or maintenance manager you need to have a way to provide regular reports to management. What sort of data should you collect and how should you present it? If you do some research you will find a variety of ratios and numbers that seem to be very important e.g. MTBF, MTTF, MTTR, downtime, backlog, etc. It can all get very confusing. Plus even if you are a genius and understand all this you have the problem of explaining it to management! What are the simplest things you can collect and show management so they understand how good a job you are doing?

Important maintenance management statistics

1. Work order 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. Over time you should be seeing a steady or reducing work order backlog.
   
   
2. Average days to complete work orders: The average days to complete work orders represents the average of the difference between work order Completed date & original Planned date for each work order. If you have consistently high values for the average days to complete work orders it means that the maintenance plan should be checked. Many tasks may actually take more time than estimated, you may have scheduling conflicts (tasks scheduled at the same time, conflicts with technicians calendar availability, ..) and so on.
   
   
3. Work order completion percent: The percentage of work orders in a specific period that have been completed. You want to see a high percentage of completed work orders. Lower percentages of completed work orders means an ever increasing maintenance backlog.
   
   
4. Equipment downtime (not availability!): You want to measure total equipment downtime. Equipment availability especially when expressed as a percentage can be misleading. For example if the equipment downtime changes from say 100 hours to 200 hours you may just see a small percentage drop in equipment availability if you have a lot of equipment. Also be aware that work order time (duration) is not the same as equipment downtime since the equipment can be down for a much longer time than the work order takes to fix it.
   
   
5. Preventive vs. Breakdown Time Spent: This is the ratio of how much time you spent on planned/ preventive maintenance vs. unplanned/ breakdown maintenance. Ideally it should be as high as possible. A low ratio generally means that unplanned/ breakdown maintenance dominates you maintenance schedule. This is the most expensive maintenance and also ends up causing a lot of dissatisfaction among users/ customers since it means they are experiencing breakdowns and you are scrambling to fix them.
   
   
6. Equipment with most preventive maintenance time/ cost: This is useful to identify which equipment requires the most planned maintenance. You should not see unexpected changes here over time since planned maintenance is something that is scheduled well in advance.
   
   
7. Equipment with most breakdown maintenance time/ cost: Identify equipment that takes most time/ money due to breakdowns. This can help you identify correction plans and preventive maintenance that may be needed to reduce this.
   
   
8. Task estimating accuracy: This is the ratio of actual time to do the work order vs. the estimated time spent doing the work order. Ideally it should be 1 or 100% (if expressed as a percentage). Low values (less than 90%) mean that work orders are taking less time to complete than estimated - you are overestimating work order time or it may mean that some task steps are being skipped by maintenance personnel. High values (more than 110%) mean that work orders are taking more time to complete than estimated - insufficient time has been budgeted for the task or skill levels of maintenance personnel is low and they are taking much longer than expected to complete jobs.

 Reviewing your maintenance management statistics

 You can see these statistics in action in the Statistics report we offer in FastMaint CMMS. Since it is a one-page report it makes it easy to share with management and to review where changes need to be made.

     We offer a fully functional 30-day trial of FastMaint CMMS which can help you calculate and review these numbers for your site. 

7 Equipment/ Asset Management Tips To Use CMMS/ Maintenance Software

Tweet

 

Proper maintenance is important to ensure maximum useful life and reduce unexpected failures of equipment. A good CMMS/ maintenance software package can help you manage both preventative as well as unplanned maintenance. Besides helping you manage equipment maintenance, the CMMS/ maintenance software can help you manage and retain a variety of equipment related information.

Ways CMMS/ Maintenance Management Software Can Help Equipment/ Asset Information Management

1. Collect equipment information: You can enter a variety of information on the equipment you have e.g. serial numbers, model numbers, manufacturer, purchase dates, warranty details and so on. This makes for better asset tracking, planning for equipment replacements, warranty work and recalls.
   
   
2. Establish relationships between equipment: You can establish relationships between equipment such as identify an equipment as part of another equipment e.g. marking a compressor as part of a HVAC system and so on. This equipment “tree” makes it easier to locate specific equipment especially when you have hundreds of similar equipment. You can also identify the impact of changes on one equipment on other equipment e.g. if you need to replace a compressor you know that the HVAC system it is in will be out of service for some time.
   
   
3. Categorize equipment for better management: You can categorize the equipment e.g. as compressors, pumps and so on. This can help you define standardized operations for all equipment of a particular category e.g. maintenance required, cost benefit analysis, depreciation schedules and so on.
   
   
4. Spares & supplies management: Manufacturer information can be used to identify part vendors, parts & supplies needed by different equipment. This can help you consolidate purchases of spare parts & supplies reducing repetitive paperwork and delays getting items.
   
   
5. Collect maintenance history & costs: Reporting features enable you to check and review the maintenance history of specific equipment. If hierarchical reports are available you could gather the entire maintenance history of an equipment and all its sub-equipment along with costs incurred. This can come in useful especially when you are looking at replacing an equipment and you want to compare its costs vs. a new equipment.
   
   
6. Collect operational history: You should be able to log and retain information about changes to equipment e.g. calibration events, problems and so on as reported by operators. Having all such information in one place makes it easier to review equipment information and identify any actions required ( troubleshooting, time for replacement, warranty calls, etc.)
   
   
7. Collect other useful information: You can store images and pictures of equipment, engineering drawings, their different parts and layout of complex items. This becomes useful when maintenance work needs to be done, equipment needs to be replaced or moved, planning for additions and so on.

CMMS/ Maintenance Management 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.

6 Ways CMMS/ Maintenance Software Can Improve Vendor Management

Tweet

 

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.