CMMS & You   by Don Mccray

in Business    (submitted 2012-01-31)

If there is one essential component to a maintenance systems manager's job, it is computerized maintenance management software (CMMS). While it is conventionally assumed that CMMS systems are not of great use to businesses other than factories, they can actually be quite advantageous to a wide array of industries. Churches, medical centers, financial institution, government agencies, and airports are just a few of the establishments that can benefit from implementing CMMS systems, which are designed to aid in total facility administration.

While hundreds of benefits to CMMS systems could be noted, five key improvements are detailed below.

1. Effectively handle client needs

CMMS systems allow all qualified system users to directly submit maintenance tickets over the network. By providing automatic progress reports on his or her ticket to the user's email inbox, CMMS systems slash the number of phone calls and emails that a system administrator would typically need to field each day, increasing the time he or she has to perform his or her job. Maintenance tickets are also able to be ranked by priority through CMMS. A hospital, for example, could program their CMMS to place top priority on pressing maintenance tickets that involved things like repairing faulty patient monitoring machines or replacing fire alarms to ascertain that these vital requests were taken care of in a timely manner.

2. Set regular maintenance to automatically repeat

Facility managers can utilize their CMMS systems to cut-down on busywork by setting certain maintenance duties to repeat. This is accomplished by setting up preventive maintenance procedures (PMs) that appear in the system as maintenance requests as their scheduled date approaches. PMs may involve such tasks as changing furnace filters or elevator inspections.

3. Data analysis and trending

Yet another benefit to implementing CMMS systems is the ability to track various data over an extended period of time. Maintenance managers can, for example, keep tabs on departments that are experiencing consistently rising costs or track a piece of machinery that has required numerous repairs for the same issue. When company budgets are tight, it is often the case that maintenance activities deemed non-essential are cut completely. CMMS systems, however, allow maintenance managers to track machine histories and other events that could ultimately prove the importance of a particular maintenance duty.

4. Effectively manage inventories

All too often, storage rooms are haphazardly organized and improperly inventoried, causing havoc when maintenance managers need to locate a specific item. The cmms program can manage all sorts of inventory needs, from automatically reordering parts to maintaining a pre-set budget by comparing parts ordered to actual usage, and automatically adjusting the numbers for the following year.

5. Efficiently track information for safety codes

Businesses must all cope with regular, if dreaded, inspections by both government and private firms. These inspections generally check for facility safety and code compliance. CMMS work order systems, though, can make the experience vastly easier by keeping an automatic repository of all necessary paperwork if the company faces an audit.

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Computerized Maintenance Management System