Your CMMS Software is Your Crystal Ball 

As a facilities manager, one of your major keys to success is understanding your assets' maintenance needs — and taking action to plan for it — as much as possible.

Without CMMS (computerized maintenance management system) software that includes options to schedule preventive maintenance projects, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of reactive maintenance, which means putting out many figurative fires and dealing with actual equipment downtime all too often. 

The effect on productivity and profit is directly tied to how well you plan for future tasks versus dealing with them when they arise. If time and money are the biggest casualties of unplanned equipment downtime, you need your own “crystal ball” to gain insight into where breakdowns can occur. Put a CMMS preventive maintenance software in place to start tracking equipment downtime, which helps prevent unproductive hours from happening in the first place. 

Reduce Equipment Downtime with Preventive Maintenance

Equipment reliability is critical for many businesses, and breakdowns can lead to lost productivity, increased costs and unhappy customers. A preventive maintenance plan using computerized maintenance management software keeps your production line alive by preparing for an emergency before it happens. This is done through using condition monitoring technologies, efficient documentation storage, managing inventory and minimizing costs.  

In your CMMS software, preventive maintenance triggers actions based on estimates from historic knowledge, combined with the average lifecycle of an asset, to create a maintenance plan for you and your team. Reactive maintenance, on the other hand, sparks action following an asset breaking, needing replacement or otherwise falling out of commission.

In other words, reactive maintenance feels like you are constantly playing catch up – and that makes it tough to optimize efficiency and productivity. It also is expensive: research shows large manufacturing facilities lose an average of 27 hours per month to machine failures. That’s a total cost of $532,000 for each hour of unplanned downtime. One hour of unplanned downtime now costs manufacturers at least 50 percent more than it did two years ago.

A CMMS preventative maintenance software provides a cloud-based information system that logs all of your tasks, maintenance requests, inventory amounts and important documents in one place. With preventative maintenance features included, you gain a greater understanding of your inventory needs, levels, incomes and outputs. 

The preventative maintenance aspect of CMMS software sends automatic notifications when certain parts fall below a set threshold, and reminds you to place orders at the correct time to keep spare parts at necessary levels, purchase when pricing is optimal and avoid the rush shipping costs in an unplanned emergency.

Cut Costs with CMMS Preventive Maintenance Software

Time is money, as they say, and unplanned shutdowns can waste up to 10 percent of available production time. These unproductive hours incur costs, including:

• Regular labor (in-house maintenance staff and outside contractors)

• Overtime hours

• Wasted products or raw materials

• Time spent testing quality for restart

• Lost revenue

• Rush shipping for new parts

• Additional administrative hours

One key benefit of CMMS software is the ability to run reports that break down your expenditures and hours spent on specific tasks. You can integrate with accounting software as well, so your CMMS truly becomes your all-knowing fortune-telling device, as well as your practical planning tool. Equipment breakdowns and wasted dollars can be a major headache, but planning for routine maintenance well in advance will help you budget better and keep your team on track instead of pivoting last minute to fix a broken machine.

By performing this routine maintenance on equipment, you can identify and address potential issues before they turn into costly breakdowns and unplanned downtime. Implementing preventative maintenance software and new tools for tracking equipment downtime may seem daunting, but the money saved in reduced downtime by putting a few measures in place is well worth the learning curve.

A major bonus of adding CMMS software to your toolbelt is that it equips you with the power to reduce equipment downtime and ensure your equipment is operating at peak efficiency. Additionally, CMMS software can help streamline the maintenance process by tracking work orders, inventory, and parts usage. This information can help you better understand the root causes of downtime and identify opportunities for improvement.

Ultimately, the right CMMS software can help you improve equipment reliability, reduce downtime, plan well in advance and maximize productivity and profitability. Maintenance Care even offers a free preventive maintenance strategy checklist to help you get started. You can use a preventative maintenance software system to maintain compliance, streamline your task assignments and document storage, keep tabs on your inventory and keep your downtime low and your revenue high. 

We can’t predict every emergency, but we can prevent many of them from happening with our simply powerful CMMS preventive maintenance software. Schedule a demo today to learn more about tracking equipment downtime and planning maintenance tasks now to prevent surprises in the future.