Digitalization of maintenance is becoming one of the innovative means for organizations to tackle financial, technical, and human issues that are central to their strategy.
A comprehensive CMMS enables a revolution in maintenance practices, transforming long-standing habits and enhancing the role of IT project managers in this transition.
Challenges in digitalizing maintenance processes
Digitizing maintenance aligns with other organizational functions—like production and quality—meeting the increasing demands for asset safety, productivity, reliability, and profitability. It also enhances information flow and interdepartmental collaboration while boosting team mobility.
Several factors are key to the success of a digital transformation in maintenance:
- Maintenance data security
- Cloud integration
- Remote access and mobility
- CMMS interoperability
How to successfully digitalize the maintenance function?
The success of the maintenance function digitalization depends on how well the transition was
prepared. As a project manager or IT manager, you play a central role in this digitalization project.
You will have to collaborate closely with the maintenance team members to understand your organization’s needs in asset management and align them with the functional reality of the CMMS solutions studied.
Are you ready to manage the project from start to finish? Will you have the time to do it? Should you just delegate this task? Do you have enough personnel to populate the database and manage the tool? How to deploy the CMMS within the organization? How to make it work?
These questions are not trivial and deserve careful consideration on your part.
Make an informed decision before embarking on your maintenance digitalization project.
Integrating CMMS with the information system
As the unique maintenance data repository, CMMS are set to become an integral part of any organization’s information system (IS).
Therefore, it is crucial to study the implementation of a CMMS solution in the information system in its globality. After all, the maintenance department interacts with other departments in the company, such as the quality, purchasing, production, accounting/management/ finance/ management control, human resources, and the list can extend to all the company’s employees who may issue work requests.
Interconnection between the CMMS and the ISÂ has many advantages:
- Productivity gains
- Improved communication
- Financial gains
- Improvement of the reactivity of the teams
Maintenance 4.0 for performance
Digital technology is at the heart of the current transformation of the maintenance landscape. New technologies are deployed at all company levels to enable maintenance to understand sticking points better, move towards preventive maintenance, and then use it as a springboard to predictive maintenance.
But beware: to make this leap to Maintenance 4.0, you will have to ensure the interoperability of the different systems, the digital continuity of data, and the preservation of the information system.
Among the major technologies that have a significant impact on the maintenance profession, the following stand out:
IoT and Predictive Analysis: to predict the risk of asset failure.
Robotics and cobotics: to help perform tedious tasks that provide little added value.
Digital twin: to prepare and improve your maintenance work.
Cloud manufacturing: to produce on-demand parts for the proper functioning of your assets.
Augmented reality: to help and protect technicians during maintenance works.
Digital tablets / Smartphone: to enjoy permanent access to the CMMS and relevant data.
The deployment of Maintenance 4.0 would be impossible without a specialized technical team and its members’ network and digital proficiencies.
A CMMS that is easy to integrate with your IS
You need a high-performance information system that takes into account the company’s processes and benchmarks. Very early on, we sought to forge connections with major players in the IT world, to meet your needs for digital continuity and system interoperability.
Today, we have connectors with SAGE X3, MICROSOFT Dynamics Business Central, and CEGID ERP Flex. Our capabilities for interconnection are not limited to these examples, and we can accommodate far more, including ERP, accounting software, BIM, MES, HR software, etc.
We have designed our CMMS as a tool to improve the overall operation of your company. Therefore, we prioritized ease of use for our solution and designed our API (application programming interface) and Web Services accordingly.
By choosing our cloud solution, you will significantly facilitate the CMMS integration with your information system and guarantee your DimoMaint CMMS is always up-to-date.
