Something goes wrong. Your boiler’s not working and a whole senior living centre is out of hot water in the middle of winter. You know it shouldn’t have failed based on its life expectancy — so how do you find out what happened?
Yes, you’ll send somebody over to address the issue. But if you don’t understand exactly what went wrong, you may just be patching over an issue that will come back to haunt you again and again.
The best way to get a full understanding of your equipment is to have a great reporting system.
Pinpoint Problems with a Maintenance History
If your system involves filing cabinets stuffed full of paper work order records? It can be very time consuming to sift through and pull things out. You can only file by one overall category.
If you choose date? You’ll find it hard to collect all records related to that boiler. But if you file by equipment, then you obviously have the opposite problem: it’ll be almost impossible to get all work orders from one particular week.
Saving information in a whole bunch of spreadsheets? You might be doing a little better, but it’s still often not simple to quickly obtain records according to a specific purpose.
Being able to instantly have access to maintenance data carries benefits many maintenance staff aren’t even aware of — because the overhead of actually collecting and organizing that data means it only happens rarely.
But when your boiler breaks, and you’re able to snap your fingers and get every work order related to the piece of equipment since installation? All of a sudden, rather than just fixing it and moving on, you can get answers to many other questions:
- How often have you performed scheduled maintenance?
- Were any maintenance tasks skipped?
- Has any one particular technician seen it more often than the others?
- Are there any comments left by the maintenance staff that hint at the issue?
- Are there any seasonal trends?
- Are there any problems that have been repeatedly fixed in the past?
All of these and more can inform your approach. It might be there’s one specific part that’s not working as it should. You might find that the boiler’s often considered low-priority and isn’t getting the attention it requires. Whatever the case, you’ve got more data — and you can make better decisions.
How Do You Get That Data?
Paper and spreadsheet-based maintenance management systems are a thing of the past if you want to operate an efficient, modern maintenance department.
Those systems were perhaps the best tools available at the time — but they’re not the right tools. What you actually need is computerized maintenance management software.
With such a platform, you can handle all your work orders digitally. This removes the need for paper and filing and takes the headache out of recording what’s happening with your maintenance.
When you’ve got CMMS? You just let it know what you need to know, and you get it. Because a computer can sort digital records way faster than a human can dig through paper.
There’s a ton of other benefits too, of course. If you’d like to know more about our CMMS solution, Maintenance Care, get yourself a demo. We’ll show you exactly how the platform can help your organization with a one-on-one session with an expert.
.svg){kind=small}