Employers in all industries have many regulatory agencies that they must answer to. From the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), compliance with workplace standards and safety measures is an important role that the facility maintenance team fulfills and a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) can assist with.

In addition to compliance, a CMMS is also a great asset in risk assessment and mitigation efforts. We take an in-depth look at these important functions and the ways modern technology can help.

How a CMMS helps with compliance

One of the challenges with compliance is that it requires your organization to be nimble. At a moment’s notice, the regulatory agency could arrive for a surprise visit. And when that happens, you need to produce reports and assessments that prove your organization’s compliance.

Without the proper tools at your disposal, these surprise visits and even the scheduled ones can consume copious amounts of work time and could lead to expensive fines. 

Documenting compliance can feel like a chore. You have to set up processes for updating spreadsheets or other compliance reports throughout the workday so you can demonstrate your compliance at any given moment. 

A CMMS offers the tools organizations need to document important compliance information and supply quick reports during unexpected visits or audits from regulatory organizations.

Using a CMMS, you can set up reporting dashboards specifically for each regulatory agency that your business must interact with. At a moment’s notice, you can pull up these dashboards and prove compliance.

Additionally, documenting compliance in a CMMS can save you money and reduce the time it takes to record crucial compliance information. No matter how many surprise visits you receive, you know you’ll be required to respond to audits with the necessary information required. Build all that into your workflows using a CMMS. 

The role of a CMMS in risk assessment

The assets within your organization have different roles and therefore carry different risks if they break down. Part of a maintenance team’s role is in managing risk associated with an asset’s possible failure.

For some assets, the risk of failure is minor and the time it takes to repair the asset won’t cause damage to your organization. For others, it can mean hours of lost productivity, costing your organization thousands of dollars or more.

Maintenance schedules can build in proactive and preventative updates to an important asset to reduce the risks your organization faces. 

A CMMS takes into account the asset’s failure history to avoid future breakdowns through an improved preventative maintenance schedule. You can also assign risk scores to different assets to prioritize maintenance requests for those assets. 

Intuitive CMMS systems can flag problems or offer alerts for your assets before their failure leads to costly expenses for your organization. 

Part of risk assessment is creating a risk contingency and mitigation plan that leaves nothing to chance and helps give your organization insights into what to expect from assets.

Selecting a CMMS for compliance and risk assessment

Eagle CMMS provides custom reporting dashboards you can use for regulatory compliance and easy responses to audits. Plus, we help you reduce your organization’s risk factors with preventative maintenance schedules that help your team prioritize its work based on the immediacy of maintenance activities.

Call us at 262-241-3845 or send us an email or schedule a demo to learn more about how it can help your organization with these two crucial functions of compliance and risk assessment.