What’s on your “Maintenance Wish List” for 2012?
If you’re like most facility managers, it includes:
- Less equipment down time
- Better management of labor resources
- More preventive maintenance scheduling
- Improved inventory management and cost control
- Fewer emergency repair and demand maintenance tasks
- Machine availability for peak production times
You may not get everything you want for Christmas, but there are CMMS tools to make a lot of your asset maintenance management wishes come true. One of the most under-utilized CMMS tools is: Scheduling.
The planning and scheduling modules in your CMMS/EAM software are designed to utilize your existing maintenance (or contract) resources to reduce downtime and minimize the overall costs through:
- Prioritization of work
- Machine availability planning
- Resource and labor planning
- Tools and materials availability
- Proactive scheduling
Establishing priorities is the first step. Schedule asset maintenance and downtime based on daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or runtime cycles and link upcoming work orders to each asset’s ideal maintenance schedule. The Planner module gives you a visual display of all maintenance activity, along with the capability to re-assign and re-schedule your resources. The Planner displays current, overdue, and upcoming work orders in a convenient calendar view. This view lets you identify resources, prevent personnel scheduling conflicts, and plan for equipment availability.
Maintenance challenges are a daily part of any facility manager’s job. But an ounce of preventive scheduling and planning will prevent a pound of headaches, cost overruns, and equipment downtime. Click here to download your free 90-day CMMS demo to see how easy it is to also add scheduling and planning to your 2012 TO-DO list.
