Efficiently manage your teams with a CMMS

Efficient and harmonious management of your maintenance teams is a delicate mission. The CMMS will allow you to optimize the allocation of your human resources.

How to effectively manage a maintenance team

How to effectively manage a maintenance team

A maintenance manager is responsible for coordinating his teams efficiently..

Concretely, he needs to:

How to effectively manage a maintenance team
transmit

Transmit clear instructions and rules applicable to every member of his team.

organiser

Organize and plan the jobs of internal and external stakeholders

define needs

Define the training and accreditation needs of each member of his team and eventually provide assistance in their training.

analyze

Analyze the individual and collective performance of his team.

submit

Have the ability to lead and motivate, so that he can run his department smoothly.

Know how

Know how to resolve internal conflicts and obstacles that team members may encounter.

Managing a maintenance team: a complex mission

Maintenance technicians are often very autonomous in their handling of daily tasks.

In fact, in many organizations, the manager often has no idea where his team members are located. Rotating work shifts and night shifts further make his supervisory role even more complicated.

Because the maintenance department is involved with every function of the organization, monitoring maintenance jobs, their traceability, and the achievement of objectives can prove challenging.

The company’s employees, who create the work requests, seldom understand why the problems raised are not immediately resolved, and as a result, maintenance technicians often feel pressured. Although they are doing everything they can to be as efficient as possible, tensions with production personnel are common. Ask your technicians if they feel overwhelmed, and they will almost certainly say, «Of course I am, I spend my days running around! ».

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Managing a maintenance team is a complex task

The problem is simple: everybody knows that maintenance teams are overworked, but no one ever knows what they are actually doing. Ideally, you would like every technician to know his work in advance so that he can prepare himself according to the safety standards and carry out the maintenance work as serenely as possible.

This ideal is achievable as the CMMS will allow you to both manage your team efficiently and ensure their safety at work.

How do I measure the effectiveness of my maintenance team?

A complete answer to this question would take a dozen pages.
We will focus here on two categories of indicators:

Activity indicators

Activity indicators are concerned with the activity of your teams. Thus, you should consider:

  • the time elapsedbetween the work request and the actual maintenance work (response time)
  • the duration of the maintenance work
  • its quality

Outcome indicators

Activity indicators are concerned with the activity of your teams. Thus, you should consider:

  • the costs of a maintenance task 
  • MTBF (reliability metric), or the Mean Time Between consecutive Failures
  • MTTR (maintainability metric), or the Mean Time To Repair.

Properly analyzed, these indicators will help you assess the efficiency of your maintenance team.

There are many other more complex indicators. The use of DIMO Maint CMMS will allow you to quickly and easily understand the difficulties your team encounters and bring them adapted solutions to improve their performance.

How do CMMS help with the daily management of your teams?

According to the French Association of Maintenance Engineers and Managers, a well-implemented and well-used CMMS solution can increase team productivity by 15 to 20%. The study also reported a 20 to 30% reduction in maintenance preparation time and a 10 to 40% reduction in the duration of the maintenance work.

How the CMMS helps to effectively manage its teams on a day-to-day basis

A comprehensive view of internal and external human resources

A maintenance unit is often composed of technicians qualified in a particular field.

To manage your team efficiently and simplify your asset maintenance, it is on you to know their skillsets and competencies. If technician A is an electrician and technician B is a mechanic, which one should you send to solve an electrical problem on a complex machine?
CMMS will help you make informed choices based on the skill mix of each individual, but also on their qualifications (electrical, CACES, etc.).

Moreover, you will also have the possibility to manage your external human resources. The DIMO Maint CMMS registers all subcontracting partners and documents the contact information for each external contributor.

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Simplified scheduling of response orders

You are constantly looking for ways to better your maintenance management. Without CMMS, the management of work orders is often complex, and it sometimes becomes close to impossible to follow up on maintenance works.

Thanks to well-thought-out ergonomics adapted to your uses, the DIMO Maint CMMS is useful to:

  • facilitate the assignment of work orders
  • improve visibility into completed works
  • improve visibility into purchase orders that need to be placed
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I receive work requests and assign them to technicians according to their competencies. This way, I create the workload plan and the technicians – who are autonomous – plan their activities accordingly. They can group together different requests, do preventive work or machine modifications, and communicate with the internal customer very easily. Once the maintenance work has been completed, I validate with the internal customer.

Romain Massé, Infrastructure technical manager – Laboratoire Rivadis

A highly effective communication tool

Thanks to its straightforward web interface, accessible by everyone anywhere, the DIMO Maint CMMS is a very effective communication tool.

The employee who encounters a problem on an asset enters his work request by filling in details via a form. He can then track the progress of his request and receive an alert when maintenance has been completed.

On the other side, the maintenance technician is alerted when a work order is assigned to him. He can thus act on it quickly and efficiently. During his work, he also has access to the asset’s breakdown history, to audio or written notes from previous technicians, and pictures of past breakdowns. He is also encouraged to document his actions as much as possible. Once the maintenance task is carried out, you are alerted in real-time so that you may confirm the details before closing the work order.

Your management also has access to all the information needed to analyze the performance and profitability of the maintenance department.

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Reduce health incidents and improve workplace safety

By moving towards a preventive maintenance plan, you will naturally come to reduce the proportion of corrective maintenance.

The latter often puts technicians in a stressful situation, thus increasing the risk for hasty actions and neglect of safety protocols.

The DIMO Maint CMMS will help you set up a maintenance plan and grant your technicians instantaneous access to handover protocol, safety instructions, and maintenance task lists.

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CMMS enables simplified activity monitoring via maintenance KPIs

Maintenance technicians often view the CMMS as a monitoring or even -god forbid!- a spying instrument for the management. Fortunately, this is not the case. On the contrary, the CMMS shows the value of their work to the entire organization. Both frontline personnel and management will have a better grasp of their activity and the amount of work done daily.

This, in turn, can help technicians make their demands heard. For example, knowing the exact number of hours spent on maintaining a machine over a given period will be very valuable to justify to management the purchase of new, expensive, but more reliable machine.

In addition, tracking key indicators maintenance KPI will improve the overall performance of the maintenance department, since anything that can be measured can be improved.

Thanks to the many analysis tools available within the CMMS, maintenance works can be broken down to highlight specifically:

  • the costs per worker, subcontractor, asset, type of maintenance, or per technology
  • major key indicators such as MTBF, MTTR, etc…
  • the success rate of the preventive program

Similarly, you will have at your disposal all the indicators to precisely oversee the management of subcontracts (with analysis by contract, subcontractor, asset, etc.).

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Enhance the organization's image and welcome young talent

Recruitment in maintenance is often complicated. The sector is under pressure, and recruiting competent technicians who are truly committed to their missions is challenging.

Young people who follow specialized maintenance training are aware of the importance of a CMMS in their daily lives. New technologies are therefore essential to enhance the image of your organization.

Let’s take the latest generation of maintenance technicians as an example. Since they are used to smartphones and tablets and are all aware of the existence of mobile CMMS, working in an organization that isn’t equipped with the latest CMMS solution is unthinkable for them.

Moreover, the CMMS helps efficiently welcome new employees. Through the DIMO Maint CMMS, new employees get quickly introduced to their work environment and will be able to:

  • quickly understand existing processes
  • access to all the information needed about assets
  • benefit from clear visibility into maintenance works to be carried out
  • learn from the feedback of other technicians
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Do you have a project, a question?

Do you have a project, a question? Hit us up and we’ll stay in touch

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