We are quickly nearing the end of the year, and what better time than now to start preparing your CMMS for the New Year and evaluating how your CMMS system is performing.

Begin by evaluating if your maintenance management system is giving you and your organization the critical data needed to make good business decisions. Then review, re-evaluate and make adjustments to your existing maintenance processes.

When you are reviewing your current system, ask these important questions:

  • Are you getting complete, reliable data to manage your maintenance process?
  • Does the data include enough detail?
  • Can you adequately forecast your facility needs for the coming years?

Once you have taken a look at what you’re doing, and what processes are working and not working, you want to make the necessary adjustments to your CMMS system and maintenance processes. Improvements to your processes and system can be made by following these steps:

  1. Plan Improvements to your Process – Review and update maintenance processes to optimize for today’s goals. Analyze the total cost of maintenance and identify opportunities and ways to improve those processes and reduce cost: Work Orders, Assets, Parts, Facility / Building, Labor.
  2. Optimize Maintenance Process – Track preventive maintenance: is the current plan effective? Review equipment history to identify and plan for replacement or obsolescence. For example, do you have too many work orders or maintenance work orders for any particular piece of equipment? If so, maybe it’s time to readjust your PM schedule for that piece of equipment. Or, maybe it’s time to replace that piece of equipment. You need to look at all these different sectors, work orders and assets, parts and labor:
    • Who’s doing what?
    • Are they doing it in a timely manner?
    • Are they completing the work?

You want to look at these processes. How they’re getting assigned and are these people completing it?

  1. Clean Up Data – Clean-up data to ensure data and reporting is accurate and performance issues are minimized.
    • Are completed work orders closed?
    • Have obsolete work orders been canceled?
    • Are the naming conventions used for assets, labor and parts appropriate?
    • Is everyone using them consistently?
    • Has equipment or assets been removed from operation?
    • Are labor lists and rates current?
  2. Year End Reporting – Run end-of-year reports to gather actionable data. This is probably the most important step because you can determine how you’re doing. These reports are crucial in identifying your problem areas and determining what actions you need to take to move forward to improve your maintenance management processes. These reports will help you answer these questions:
    • Did on-demand work order execution meet goals?
    • Were preventive maintenance work orders effective?
    • Was equipment-downtime minimized?
    • Was labor used efficiently?
    • Were part inventories maintained at appropriate levels?
  3. Plan Your Budget – Plan budget to meet goals for 2016. Compare actual maintenance costs against budgets. Are you implementing any new programs or upgrading current tools? Include Training and identify process failure points that require re-training for existing staff and training of new personnel.
  4. Implement New Programs – Implement new programs to improve performance and reduce costs. Fully utilize software to gather complete, reliable data. Train your team on process changes.

Going forward, you want to know what’s working, what’s not working, and what is lacking. Now is a good time to review, re-evaluate and make adjustments to your maintenance management process to ensure you set your maintenance operation up for success for 2016.

 

PROTEUS MMX USERS – BUDGET ALERT

Current MMX users, this is the time of the year where you need to update your budgets for each cost center. If you don’t know what the budget is yet, or you are using cost centers to track work order costs against the cost center, remember to add the budget as zero. The actuals will accumulate against the zero budgets. If you don’t have a 2016 budget for the cost center, it will not accumulate the data. If you need help or clarification, call our office for help:  1-800-388-3268 in the US/Canada, all others +1-262-241-3845.
cmms Reporting Year End Reporting