How to Choose the Best Maintenance Management System
The process of maintaining and protecting the tangible assets and resources of your business to enhance asset availability and dependability, maximise the efficacy of essential services, and manage and lowering expenses is known as maintenance management.
Businesses focus their efforts on six main aims to achieve those goals:
- Preparing the upkeep tasks
- Cutting down on device malfunction
- Preventing output disruptions
- Reducing the expense of upkeep
- Ensuring adherence to regulations
- Establishing a workplace that is both secure and effective
A company may experience repeated safety risks, lost output hours, and increased energy costs if it ignores maintenance management in the near term. All of these things could have a detrimental impact on their earnings and bottom line.
Types Of Maintenance Management
1) Preventative Maintenance: The most fundamental approach, preventative maintenance (PM for short), is also the simplest and least expensive.
With PM, companies can regularly plan upkeep tasks during the year or after a certain number of hours or kilometres have been logged on an asset.
2) Condition-Based Maintenance: Condition-Based Maintenance is the next level of maintenance after Preventative Maintenance. Teams use the CBM methodology to monitor the equipment’s state and make necessary repairs.
3) Predictive Maintenance: Predictive Maintenance is the third level of maintenance management’s expense and complexity spectrum. (PdM).
To forecast when a machine is likely to malfunction, PdM combines condition-monitoring devices and machine learning.
PdM is an early warning system that alerts maintenance staff to potential problems and gives them plenty of time to plan and arrange fixes before the machinery breaks down.
4) Prescriptive Maintenance: Prescriptive Maintenance is the most costly and laborious maintenance management technique.
Prescriptive maintenance is a more sophisticated version of predictive maintenance that employs sensors and analytics to perform self-diagnosis and offer workers possible fixes for any asset problems.
What is a computerised management system for maintenance (CMMS)?
Software that centralises maintenance data and streamlines maintenance activities is a computerised maintenance management system or CMMS. It aids in maximising the use and accessibility of tangible assets like machines, cars, communications, plant infrastructures, and other assets. CMMS systems, also called computerised maintenance management information systems (CMMIS), are used in the industrial, energy, transportation, building, and other areas where physical infrastructure is essential.
How does a CMMS work?
The data in a CMMS database serves the system’s different functions, which make it possible to do the following things:
- Managing resources and labour: Keep track of qualified personnel and tools availability. Assemble teams and assign particular duties. Manage pay amounts and job scheduling.
- Asset registry: Maintain, exchange, and obtain data about assets, including:
- The apparatus class and category, the maker, the model, and the serial number
- Costs and identifiers related
- Location, occupation, and data on uptime and performance
- Repair instructions, safety protocols, and warranties, as well as any related footage and photos
- Meters, sensors, and Internet of Things (IoT) equipment are readily available.
- Work order administration: Work order administration, which is frequently seen as the primary purpose of CMMS, contains data like:
- The work request number
- Definition and importance
- Type of order (repair, replace, scheduled)
- Cause-and-effect diagrams
- Assignment of personnel and use of resources
Work order management contains the following skills as well:
- Automatic creation of task orders
- Set aside supplies and machinery.
- Schedule and distribute personnel, teams, and schedules
- Examine the state and monitor outages
- Keep track of your expenses, both anticipated and actual.
- Affix any relevant legal records, maintenance, and safety media.
- Automate work order start for preventive maintenance based on utilisation, time, or prompted occurrences. Preventative maintenance can be used to group and link assets across various tasks. Preventive repair orders should be scheduled and in order.
- Inventory, disseminate, and reclaim materials and tools used in maintenance and repair operations (MRO) across storage spaces, delivery hubs, and sites. Control suppliers, monitor stocking prices, and manage replenishment.
- Reporting, analysis, and auditing: Produce reports on various maintenance topics, including the availability of assets, the consumption of materials, the prices of labour and materials, source evaluations, and more. Gather and arrange information for audits and analyse data to understand asset availability, performance patterns, MRO inventory optimisation, and other data to support business choices.
Benefits of Maintenance Management
1. Extend the longevity of the commodity: The most significant advantage of preventive upkeep is increased asset lifetime. Maintaining your tools will enable it to operate longer and cost less. Mean time between failures, or MTBF, is a popular KPI that facilities managers use to make knowledgeable repair choices. By keeping track of data like MTBF, you can schedule preemptive maintenance at precisely the right time and capture the equipment before it breaks down.
2. Less chance of failure: Preventive maintenance also has the critical advantage of lowering the chance of failures. In actuality, a decreased case of breakdown is the primary cause of the majority of the benefits mentioned here. If you put off maintenance until something breaks, your business could suffer from lost output and a bad image.
3. Boost performance: Equipment that receives regular periodic repair lasts longer and operates more effectively. Overall Equipment Effectiveness, or OEE, is a popular KPI for repair management that gauges productivity. Three categories—availability, efficiency, and quality—are used by OEE to evaluate equipment.
4. Reduce unscheduled outages: Machine delay is unavoidable when maintenance is being done, whether you decide to use reactive or proactive maintenance. However, delays can be significantly decreased by planning care with an aggressive maintenance strategy. Wait periods to see specialist technicians or the delivery of required components may increase the machine’s delay in the case of reactive maintenance repairs.
5. Encourage health and security: Maintaining accurate records and routine upkeep can also enhance the well-being and security of your establishment. Health and safety are essential in every facility, including workplace buildings and schools, despite the misconception that they are primarily a worry in facilities with hazardous machinery when discussing routine maintenance.
6. Increase client happiness: Maintaining machinery as effectively as possible results in cost savings and increased income, strengthening the brand and increasing customer happiness. Preventive maintenance is preventing breakdowns and maintaining the standard of the goods created in manufacturing facilities. This ensures consumer happiness with the product, reinforcing the brand image.
7. Save money: All of the benefits above of routine upkeep ultimately point to one thing: financial savings. Unplanned repair costs 3 to 9 times as much as scheduled maintenance.
Objectives of Maintenance Management
1. Manage the budget and costs: The first goal I want to discuss with you is budgeting and expense management. To ensure everything runs smoothly, the maintenance manager distributes the money he provides among the department’s resources. Budgets should allocate money for both scheduled and unplanned (or corrective) repairs.
2. Adherence to Regulations: There are various rules to observe, which differ depending on the business. FERC, EPA, and OSHA rules must all be followed by companies in the oil and gas sector. The food and beverage business is required to abide by several safety rules, including those suggested by the FDA. The manufacturing team must always consider local, state, and federal regulatory compliance standards.
3. Plan Maintenance Work: Planning repair tasks is a part of strategic maintenance management. This is significant because it helps maintenance teams decrease the frequency of big asset breakdowns by effectively allocating the necessary time and manpower resources to proactive, preventive maintenance tasks. Maintenance managers need a thorough grasp of the business’s organisational structure to plan tasks successfully. It will assist in ranking different tasks in order of importance.
4. Ensure Employee Security: Protecting all employees, both inside and outside the repair section, is a further goal of maintenance management. Boilers, compressors, material processing machinery, and other assets that could become hazardous if they fail are regularly inspected to accomplish this. Everyone in the company is safer when upkeep is handled correctly. While many devices can be dangerous under normal circumstances, when they break down, the risk increases. Providing adequate training on how each asset works, essential safety dos and don’ts, and emergency scenario procedures is crucial.
5. Reduce Production Downtime and Equipment Failure: When routine maintenance tasks are appropriately handled, maintenance teams can better achieve their goal of maximising machine availability. To keep equipment operating and reduce failure and production halts, maintenance workers must be able to remain on top of routine maintenance. However, since downtime cannot be prevented entirely, repairs must be made promptly and effectively when necessary.
6. Increase Machine Useful Life: Machines last longer when maintenance duties are correctly assigned, prioritised, and finished quickly. A sound maintenance strategy enhances reliability, availability, and maintainability over time. Proactive maintenance labour, such as preventive, predictive, and condition-based maintenance, is used to achieve this. To avoid asset breakdowns, preventive care includes small upkeep tasks and checks.
How to Choose the Best Maintenance Software
1) What issues do we hope a CMMS will address?
Bring important techs and project management team members together to collect paperwork for any procedures you want to automate. This will enable you to highlight the features that will be most crucial for your new CMMS, spot existing workflow inefficiencies, and arrange the assets in your maintenance plan.
2) Does it have all the features we need?
It’s critical to find CMMS elements that address your repair requirements. Save time and look at other choices if a management software solution lacks the features you must have.
Some essential qualities to search for in a CMMS are:
- Organisational asset administration (EAM)
- Automation of preventive upkeep
- Work order administration
- History of asset management projects
- Site for work requests
The features of CMMSs are all different. Some things are more critical than others. Look at the chart below to understand how to rank the most important characteristics.
3) Is it on-premises or in the cloud?
A crucial decision is whether to use on-premises or the cloud. It can significantly affect the total execution costs, the speed at which updates and problem fixes happen, and other crucial factors. Benefits can be found in both.
4) Is it easy to monitor inventory utilisation and upkeep work?
A well-functioning repair section depends on efficient work orders and inventory administration. It instantly becomes much simpler to handle equipment maintenance, and building maintenance, reduce outages, and safeguard the company’s bottom line when you simplify maintenance duties and spare parts inventory.
5) How simple (or challenging) is it to plan maintenance?
One of the most frequently asked CMMS functions is maintenance scheduling, which makes sense. Quickly planning and monitoring routine repair work is crucial to managing an efficient maintenance department and reducing operating costs.
Conclusion:
When you perform maintenance on your equipment, the lifespan of that equipment is extended, there is less downtime, fewer requests for reactionary maintenance are made, you are better able to handle compliance and inspection requirements, and there are more periodic expensive adjustments needed in an emergency.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Preventive and remedial maintenance are the two significant parts of system maintenance. Contrary to corrective maintenance, which involves replacing or repairing a system or its components after failing, preventive maintenance entails taking steps to help keep the system in working order.
The upkeep procedure aims to maintain a system’s capacity to deliver a service. This process keeps track of the system’s ability to provide services, logs issues for analysis, implement remedial, adaptive, perfective, and preventive measures, and verifies that capability has been fully recovered.
By using planned preventative maintenance (PPM), you can keep your assets and structures in the desired or required condition while also significantly reducing reactionary maintenance. Preventive maintenance is either condition-monitored or time-based.
A maintenance scope entails providing all required people, specialised tools, and materials, such as engineering maintenance technology, as well as maintenance activity, inspection, training, and other maintenance-related activities.
