How to Use Maintenance Data to Make Smarter Budget Decisions

A  state-of-the-art Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) can help you reduce costs, improve productivity, minimize downtime, and enhance the safety of your workers. But it can’t do any of that unless you’re using it to its full potential.  

If you’re only using your CMMS for basics like tracking task completion, you’re missing out on a wealth of data that will make your decisions better and help improve your bottom line. You’re also spending time and money doing work manually that your CMMS is designed to do automatically.  

You don’t need to spend hours retraining on your CMMS to get the most out of it. Discover how you can make it work for you, and how it can back up your budgetary decisions with hard data.  

 Costs of Underutilization  

When you’re not tapping into the full capabilities of your CMMS, you’re not only missing opportunities; you’re incurring added costs and spending time and money on tasks that your CMMS could be doing for you.  
 

 Manual Administrative Tasks  

If you’re spending hours a day on tasks like creating work orders by hand, sending out reminder messages, and updating spreadsheets, your CMMS could free up that time for actual maintenance management functions.  

 Reactive Maintenance  

Without a systematic way to track maintenance, you could be wasting money on emergency repairs. With a more proactive, automated approach, you can schedule downtime in advance, order parts, and have the right technicians on hand, lowering your repair costs significantly. 

 Work Duplication and Inefficiencies  

 If they’re not using a centralized system, multiple technicians might be working on the same issue, ordering the same parts as each other, and doing partial repairs without documenting them. Properly used, a CMMS allows managers and technicians to prioritize repairs, track them, and coordinate with each other on critical issues.  

These problems are compounded when maintenance technicians don’t have mobile access to work orders and have to run back and forth to the office for updates and instructions. A properly utilized CMMS allows technicians to remain in the field, guided by the most up-to-date information about the task at hand.  

Compliance Failures  

Safety inspections and compliance reports can easily be missed when they’re manually tracked. These failures can be costly, leading to potential fines and even shutdowns. More importantly, they could lead to workplace injuries or worse.  

Underutilization of your CMMS doesn’t only mean you’re spending money on software that you’re not using; it means that you’re incurring additional costs, spending unneeded technician hours, and risking compliance and safety oversights.  

Using Your CMMS Effectively  

Setting up your CMMS to minimize cost and time inefficiencies doesn’t always mean a complete audit and overhaul of your maintenance program. Some easy tweaks can yield big improvements. For example:  

• Schedule recurring tasks for routine maintenance. This will reduce paperwork and make sure these regular tasks don’t fall through the cracks.  

• Set up alerts and notifications for things like overdue tasks, low parts and supplies inventory,  upcoming inspections, repair cost overruns, and maintenance activities that exceed predictions.  

• Set up workflows to automatically send work orders and approvals to the appropriate people.  

• Enable mobile approvals and updates so technicians can go from site to site without having to return to the office.  

• Require time and cost tracking by technicians and managers.  

• Track vendor performance on factors such as response times, repair costs, and parts delivery.  
• Allow direct maintenance requests by machine operators and other personnel on the floor.  

These simple fixes will help you save time and money right away and pave the way to full optimization and utilization of your CMMS.  

Using Data to Inform Decisions  

A few improvements in the way you use your CMMS will get more data flowing into the system and onto your dashboards. Using that data to make decisions is the next step in getting your CMMS to really work for you. Here’s how: 

Forecasting Costs  

Use data to analyze past cost patterns and budget for upcoming costs more accurately.  

Identifying Cost Drivers  

Create monthly reports to track where your maintenance budget is being spent. Reports will help you identify inefficiencies and potential revisions to maintenance schedules.  

Planning for Capital Investments  

With better tracking and more complete insights about the status of your assets, you’ll know when critical assets will need to be replaced. This benefits both budgeting and accounting functions.  

Monitoring Budgeting Performance  

Data from your CMMS makes it easy to compare your budget predictions with actual outcomes. Spot areas for further refinement as you expand the capabilities of your tracking system.  

Justifying Budget Requests 

For better or for worse, data is convincing. Back up your asks with hard numbers and graphs produced by your CMMS so that you’re not left with shortfalls during your next budget cycle.   

Real-World Examples of Using CMMS for Budgeting Improvements  

Example 1: Identifying Sources of Cost Overruns  

A mid-size manufacturing facility on the East Coast was constantly overrunning its annual maintenance budget due to unexpected breakdowns. The maintenance manager began using their CMMS to track every work order and isolate the repair cost for each asset. The data revealed that three aging compressors were responsible for nearly 40% of emergency repairs. Using that data, the company replaced the problematic units and scheduled preventative maintenance for the rest. These small improvements, powered by data insights from their CMMS, cut their downtime by over 25% and reduced their emergency repair budget by 50%. 

Example 2: Improving Forecasting  

A school district in Colorado was having trouble predicting annual maintenance expenses. Each year, fluctuating repair costs threw their budget off track. When they started using their CMMS more consistently, they began to log all work orders, parts costs, and labour costs. With that information, they had more reliable data to work with. By analyzing trends, they noticed that the HVAC units for several of their schools required more frequent repairs as they aged. Armed with concrete numbers, they budgeted for replacements over a three-year period to build those costs into their capital budget.  

By integrating data into their budgeting process, the school district improved their financial stability and inspired confidence in the budgeting team. Quoting the facilities manager, “Our budgets used to be educated guesses at best. Now we can look at several years of maintenance history and know what to expect. When we make a request for more funding, we have the data to back it up.” 

Optimizing Your CMMS with Maintenance Care  

Get your CMMS working for you and your budgeting. Maintenance Care makes the process simple with these key features:  

• Work order management: create and track maintenance tasks automatically to eliminate manual paperwork. Clearly assigning the tasks to individuals avoids duplicating efforts.  

• Preventative maintenance scheduling: automate recurring maintenance tasks such as inspections, lubrication, parts replacement, and tune-ups to reduce downtime and avoid emergency repair costs.  

• Automated alerts and notifications: Stay on top of work orders, low inventory, upcoming external inspections, and overdue tasks.  

• Asset tracking and service history records: Know where your assets are at all times, along with their associated documents, such as service records, manuals, warranties, and other crucial information.  

• Parts and supplies inventory management: Keep track of supplies and spare parts that you have on hand and trigger automatic reorder points when inventory is low.  

• Reporting and analytics dashboard: Access all your data in one place, and turn that data into tools for forecasting, identifying emerging issues, and justifying budget requests.   

• Vendor management: Maintain records of vendor performance and keep track of outstanding orders and requests.  

• Mobile CMMS App: Make the most of your technicians’ time by giving them access to work orders, up-to-date information about assets and their service histories, and on-site reporting capabilities without needing to return to the office.  

Not sure if you’re using your CMMS effectively? Contact us! Maintenance Care’s software specialists will help you discover the features you’re underutilizing and show you how to integrate your software into your daily operations and your budgeting process.