How to better manage your maintenance?
Organizing your maintenance management according to present and future needs can be very complex and risk being inefficient without an adapted and structured solution.
Improving the efficiency of maintenance works and the effectiveness of the managing teams is only realistic if the underlying organization and methodology are sound. Therefore, before any steps are taken in this endeavor, it is necessary to reconsider maintenance management in a more rigorous and structured way, in order to:
Simplify your asset management with a comprehensive view of your assets
One of the most important missions of the maintenance department is to ensure assets’ availability, reliability, and safety in a way that aligns with business needs and objectives. This is easier said than done, however, and asset management can quickly become a real headache, with a multitude of questions to take into consideration, such as: how many times has this machine been repaired in a year? Or how much money has been invested? When you lack visibility into your assets, you struggle to find the necessary technical documentation while your technicians waste time even locating the asset to repair.
How do CMMS facilitate asset management?
Much more comprehensive and powerful than an Excel-based organization, a CMMS tool offers you a specialized solution to manage your assets, organize your maintenance, and hence:
Easily and quickly inventory all your assets in a tree structure that is unlimited in the number of levels and can be modified over time.
Easily find your assets (through QR Code scan, Bleam scan, etc.).
Connect all accounting and technical information with each asset..
Quickly access information about assets’ parts and contracts.
Quickly access the bill of material, maintenance log, and preventive maintenance plan related to an asset.
View the history of the asset’s movements and previous assignments in the tree structure.
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What benefits can you expect from efficient maintenance management?
Efficient management of your assets allows you to comprehensively meet four crucial objectives:
Cost reduction
Thanks to a detailed view of the general cost of each asset, improved decision-making on renewals, and overall better monitoring and control.
Improved processes
Through increased reactivity in case of breakdowns and optimized management of critical asset parts in stocks.
Better team management
With an efficient allocation of maintenance works according to the type of asset and/or the malfunction observed.
Risk reduction
On account of better communication and compliance with regulations, as well as the ability to anticipate and act at the right time.
Optimize the planning of your maintenance works and set up a preventive maintenance plan
If your assets are often out of order, and most of your maintenance works consist in putting out fires (“Fireman mode”) and troubleshooting, it may be time to change your current organization, to become more proactive and reduce the probability of failure or degradation of your assets. With the implementation of a preventive maintenance plan, you can significantly improve your maintenance management.
Why solely relying on corrective maintenance can hurt your organization?
Instead, take the smart approach with a CMMS, which schedules and tracks the completion of past, present, and future maintenance works:
- Reserve the relevant parts in the stock to intervene efficiently;
- Benefit from replenishment suggestions to identify and recommend the parts necessary for the good realization of maintenance works to come
- Optimize shutdowns by planning them in conjunction with other departments to avoid disrupting production
- Optimize maintenance by scheduling works over the same type of asset at the same time or by organizing rounds to carry out regulatory controls (for fire extinguisher checks, for example)
- Anticipate recurring maintenance works and create a schedule for future maintenance accordingly
Maintenance management and safety control
You must comply with the regulations relating to your assets and buildings, to ensure the safety of the personnel involved and the conformity of the materials used. The hierarchy is legally responsible for any work accident resulting from a maintenance operation or the breakdown of an asset that was subject to regulations.
Ensure traceability of regulatory controls
You must enforce periodic mandatory regulatory audits and inspections by a qualified agent or organization to check the electricity, forklifts, doors and gates, fire protection systems, etc.
Please note that it is your responsibility to ensure the complete traceability of these audits!
It is also your responsibility to produce the formal documentation for each asset according to the latest regulations.
Respect the maintenance constraints inherent to your sector of activity
As you evolve in different sectors of activity (industry, food industry, hospital maintenance, …) , you must follow the constraints related to the business. For example, in the food industry, the maintenance manager must pay special attention to the safety of the food and, broadly speaking, of consumers, since maintenance is indeed one of the main vectors of microbiological, chemical, or physical contamination.
Given the substantial economic cost of product withdrawal or recall, the maintenance department must be trained in hygiene rules and be acutely aware of the risks that come with gaps in safety protocol.
A CMMS helps you structure and formalize your best practices with the right procedures and instructions for optimal efficiency and safety.
Maintenance has a direct influence on the performance of production equipment by limiting downtime and reducing accidents. The slightest accident can ruin a production process, and a stoppage can cost up to 50 to 60,000€/day.
José Garcia, maintenance manager – Groupe Alsys
CMMS improve the management of your maintenance teams
Managing a maintenance team, whether it is composed of internal technicians or external contributors, can be challenging. It involves managing personnel, schedules, and monitoring the completion of maintenance works, including emergencies. The maintenance manager must juggle various schedules, such as the attendance schedule, the work schedule, the planned stoppages schedule, and the weekly production schedule in industrial businesses.
Efficient management of your resources is essential to guarantee maintenance works run smoothly and a better reactivity from your organization.
Effectively manage the internal workforce
Managing a maintenance team can be very complex with, among the members, highly diverse skills, credentials, shift schedules, working hours on weekends and vacations, and potentially different locations and languages.
Paper-based organization is insufficient at this point and you need a visual and synthetic management tool.
The implementation of a maintenance management solution allows you to have a complete schedule that can be consulted by the entire team and updated in real-time.
Improve the management of your subcontractors and contracts
Do you subcontract all or part of your maintenance and supervise maintenance operations carried out by external parties? Thanks to a CMMS solution, your internal and external teams collaborate and communicate optimally using the same tool, while historical data is preserved as you remain up-to-date with your assets. CMMS promote serene communication between all the involved parties, owing to its:
- knowledge sharing based on reviewing tools such as Fault Tree Analysis,
- instant information sharing (to notify everyone of changes in shifts or absences, for example),
- information durability, which is guaranteed even in the event of a personnel change.
Analyze and manage your maintenance activity
How can you optimize the activity of your maintenance department without precisely tracking your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)?
Maintenance KPIs must be defined and tracked to measure the effectiveness of your actions in achieving your objectives, such as cost reduction.
The most common indicators monitored by the maintenance manager are:
The activity of the team
The results obtained
The costs
A CMMS software is one of the best tools to collect accurate information about each of your assets. It allows you to automate processes and systematically generate reports, which leads to better-informed decision-making.
CMMS also facilitates the execution, evaluation, and improvement of technicians’ work.
CMMS, the daily ally of the maintenance manager
How does DIMO Maint help you in your job as a maintenance manager?
In the current landscape of digital transformation, our CMMS solution was designed to help you stop wasting time juggling spreadsheets and papers, and focus, once more, on your core mission: maintenance.
The DIMO Maint CMMS answers your firm’s organizational and forecasting needs. Additionally, it was also designed to simplify maintenance works, ensure the safety of the personnel involved, and help you analyze and conduct your maintenance activity efficiently.
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