GETTING VALUABLE INSIGHTS FROM MAINTENANCE SOFTWARE

Facilities maintenance software may not be the most glamorous software on the block, but it can be quite revealing. For example, maintenance software can provide you with valuable insights into operations and show you areas that you can immediately improve. As a result, you may be able to reduce downtime, slash costs, and gain that elusive competitive edge. How can getting down to the nitty-gritty of facilities maintenance do so much? It all comes down to information and analytics.

Maintenance software is useful in tracking your facility’s overall equipment effectiveness, or OEE. In a perfect world, OEE would live up to its promise and your organization would achieve its goal of perfection (100 percent value-added work, 100 percent speed/capacity, and 100 percent perfect quality). Unfortunately, few companies can lay claim to 100 percent OEE. However, if you can improve your existing OEE rate, wouldn’t it be worth doing?

Facilities maintenance software can address an important component of OEE: equipment downtime. By computerizing equipment maintenance tasks, work, scheduled maintenance, and processes, you can equip your maintenance team with the information it needs to anticipate issues, perform preventative maintenance, schedule repairs, and reduce downtime. This information can also improve productivity and streamline processes, resulting in lower labor costs and less reliance on outside contractors.

Analytical tools in maintenance software can also provide you with the insight you need to make better decisions. For example, visual dashboards could make trends more readily apparent than a stack of work orders detailing unexpected equipment failures. Using this information, you can have your team proactively inspect similar equipment for signs of a looming failure. Analytical tools can also help you decide when it’s time to retire and replace older or obsolete equipment instead of repairing it.

Facilities maintenance software and the insights it reveals can play an important role in improving OEE and reducing downtime.

KEEPING MAINTENANCE STAFF RUNNING

Most people that do not manage a maintenance staff do not really consider everything that is necessary to do to keep it up and running at any given time. Not only do you need to keep up the morale of the maintenance staff so that they are more productive, you also need to make sure that everything is run according to schedule. That is why most companies that have a larger maintenance staff will use some type of CMMS program (Computerized Maintenance Management System) that will allow them to set the tickets in motion and track them throughout the entire process. This type of software may also be incorporated in with an equipment tracking software or within enterprise asset management system that will help to give you a more complete control over the entire project.

It is not only important to ensure that everything is running smoothly through one of those facilities, it is also important to keep ahead of any potential problems that may occur. Preventative maintenance is, in many ways, more important than the maintenance which is done when something actually breaks down. Not only is it going to help you to save money by allowing you to avoid those more expensive maintenance tickets, it is also going to help you to save time and keep your facility up and running smoothly. Regardless of whether you are doing maintenance in a large-scale apartment community or if you are taking care of a local factory, keeping these things in mind will help things to be maintained properly. (Source: CMMS Program from eMaint)