7 Benefits of CMMS Software

Computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) increase the lifespan of your machinery and equipment by automating maintenance practices. But is that the sole reason you should buy a CMMS? Alongside increasing the lifespan of assets, any organization has a wide range of benefits of a CMMS implementation, such as reducing downtime and controlling costs.

For the enterprise heavily invested in equipment assets, ensuring the operational health of your equipment is one of your key business success factors. It’s critical to your enterprise to lower the overall cost of maintenance while improving productivity through equipment availability. Computerized maintenance management software systems provide a solution that can help save time and money, as well as improve the health and safety of your assets.

Further reading: Our guide to The Best CMMS Software

1 Schedule Maintenance Operations Effectively

CMMS systems can automatically generate maintenance calendars. Within a maintenance calendar, a CMMS marks the dates when the different maintenance tasks must be carried out. These calendars simplify the monitoring of work requests that change and will optimize efficiency in real-time through on-demand calendar adjustments.

A maintenance manager can use a CMMS tool to carefully plan their asset management maintenance activities that lie ahead, rather than waiting for the assets to break down. The best CMMS solutions will allow maintenance teams to track an asset’s performance and health at all times, leading to fewer failures.

Scheduled maintenance also provides a level of automation to your asset management environment:

• Work orders can be automatically created when a breakdown is detected
• Purchase orders can be automatically created when planned maintenance is about to occur–ensuring the business has the spare parts required for the repair
• Routine audits can keep condition in the best operating condition

2 Lower Total Cost of Maintenance With CMMS

A capable equipment maintenance system means less time and money spent on both planned and unplanned maintenance. By keeping accurate tracking on equipment maintenance, a CMMS allows you to plan maintenance before expensive repairs are required:

• Track when preventative maintenance is required and identify optimum times to perform it
• Provides a centralized repository for maintenance instructions and info
• Offers consistency in reporting, managing, and tracking repairs.

3 Increase The Lifespan of Assets And Reduce Equipment Downtime

CMMS will keep track of parts inventory management, which records parts usage and the average lifespan of these spare parts. The CMMS will identify where parts belong in a physical inventory environment and be assigned varying levels of criticality and be stocked appropriately. By having a high level of spare pieces of equipment, maintenance managers can reliable fix issues at a faster pace.

Sensors on machines can also provide metrics and identify problems before they occur–allowing maintenance work to be completed before an asset failure. This will extend the asset lifespan by preventing any critical failures from damaging any machines in use–something that will surely have larger repair costs over time.

4 Improved Safety Standards Through Preventive Maintenance Tasks

Part of maintaining assets is ensuring the equipment is running safely at a peak performance, while also ensuring the work environment is safe for the machine operators. A CMMS system streamlines this process by creating a safer environment, helping stay in line with safety and compliance regulations, and tracking employee training and certifications.

CMMS software lets a business map out every asset in the facility, which details locations of equipment and drawings/schematics, safety instructions, and other valuable bits of information This safety and hazardous notifications usually exist for compliance requirements or regulations the business must follow, which help prepare for audits and inspections.

CMMS can identify the procedures and processes to stay compliant by setting up tasks that must be completed. This can also include scheduling workers who are qualified as well as scheduling untrained staff members for performance reviews to ensure their safety standards are up to par.

5 Ensuring Quality Control and Productivity With Maintenance Data

A business that provides top-notch goods and services has a large impact on customer satisfaction and retention. Limiting breakdowns is critically important to reducing cycle times. The speed of your delivery is a business differentiator, as equipment kept in sub-standard condition yields inferior products and services.

Maintenance data and KPIs collected from CMMS can turned into a variety of formats and sent to a number of locations. This data is organized in a way that makes it easier to visualize and make decision with. Implementing a CMMS is a great opportunity to review your data entry policies in order to ensure standardization across the board. This helps avoid incomplete records from being created, which can lead to poor quality control.

6 Cash-Flow and Planning

Equipment failures are a major source of unplanned expenses. Implementing and executing a proper maintenance plan is a fundamental step toward eliminating unexpected and burdensome costs.

CMMS software helps you limit unpredictable and large costs. They also help you spread costs much more evenly and predictably. Some CMMS programs even provide sophisticated tools that allow you to make repair versus replace decisions based on reliable data.

7 Increased Machine Uptime

CMMS features allow maintenance managers to plug in estimates about their expected work order management and overall enterprise asset management. This can help generate an average cost of machine downtime per hour. Manufacturing companies can also determine their estimated amount of revenue lost per hour during downtime.

A CMMS solution will calculate machine downtime by looking at:

• Employee costs per hour
• Employees affected by downtime
• Revenue affected by downtime
• Number of units produced per hour
• Average profit per unit
• Number of hours of downtime

Then, the CMMS solution will increase machine uptime by:

• Showing managers current work load schedule and what assets and workers are involved
• Setting notifications to alert the maintenance department before work needs to be performed
• Automatically creating work requests

Find The Right CMMS Software Today

Many companies may try to go without CMMS software and handle their preventive maintenance with manual methods. Combined with the low cost of QuickBooks for your basic accounting and inventory, this is one way to keep your software costs at their lowest. This manual method is typically by using spreadsheets. However, these methods become much harder to track your equipment due to the fact that spreadsheets lack sustainability.

The more tasks each repair job has, the more that needs to get added to the schedule. Having to go back and forth to check off maintenance steps is far too time-consuming to be practical this way.

CMMS solutions apply to a huge variety of industries. Manufacturers, facility management firms, industrial and commercial service firms, contractors, agricultural operations & more. The benefits of a computerized maintenance management system remain the same:

• Lower total cost of maintenance.
• Improvements in quality control.
• Increased productivity.
• Stronger ability to accurately budget and plan cash-flow.

If you’re in the market for CMMS software, you’ll want to analyze what your exact needs are based on a number of factors, such as the size of your company.