The world of CMMS comes with terms you may find yourself getting mixed up. Well, no more. We've prepared a quick list of the more common and important terms in Computerized Maintenance Management Software to serve as a handy reference. Let's begin!
Let's start with the big one. CMMS stands for Computerized Maintenance Management Software. This tracks and streamlines your entire maintenance department. It allows you to do things like track work orders, send out work in real time, work remotely, schedule preventative maintenance, keep up with equipment and inventory, and more.
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These two pretty much go hand in hand. Preventative maintenance is what you schedule in advance. Most of the time, on some type of regular basis – be it daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly. These are things like changing out air filters on a certain day or adding lubrication to a piece of machinery each month. It's the tasks that keep everything running smoothly before there is an issue that causes downtime or makes more work.
This is a little different from preventative maintenance because this is more of a prediction of when the actual maintenance will be needed. This predictive maintenance strategy can even allow you to have a good idea of when you will have equipment failure on a certain piece.
Key performance indicators are metrics used by managers to help them evaluate the performance within the company. CMMS, if configured and used properly, can allow managers and other users to view real-time KPIs on dashboards and reports. Some of these include equipment downtime, labor utilization, work orders completed on time, maintenance costs — and a few more complicated ones.
You have a few of these – mean time between failures, mean time in between repairs, and mean time to repair. Mean time between failures is a projection of an equipment failure and how that is calculated. For instance, a machine tears up in 100 hours of use. The next time it tears up is around 150 hours of use and the next time – 139 hours of use. You take that average and that gives you the mean time between repairs so you can predict it easier. Mean time in between repairs is different because it is counting the necessary instances of repairs during a period of time and dividing the latter number by the former. Lastly, mean time to repair is the total unplanned or corrective maintenance time of failures and divide it by the total number of corrective or unplanned maintenance work orders.
Want to learn even more about CMMS? Check out this full CMMS guide!