Every few years there is a management change of personnel or policies (and sometimes both). This is true in almost all maintenance departments. Sometimes this is a smooth transition with few changes and sometimes this transition includes a transformation at all levels.

Regardless of the depth or breadth, these changes need to be managed and measured.

This is a good time to review your computerized maintenance management software (CMMS) configurations to ensure you have the codes and processes in place to capture the effects of the new policies.

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There are countless benefits to a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS). Efficiency and accountability are high on the list due to their large impact over time. There is, however, a big payoff for the utilization of a CMMS that is not so well known. In a word, COMPLIANCE.

There are several instances that come to mind of inspections and lawsuits where the CMMS reports played a key role in proving “due diligence” of a TeamWORKS client.

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How much time and money is wasted responding to work requests for problems that don’t exist or are easy to resolve? 

There are ways around these nuisance work orders. Establish a checklist for types of equipment and make it part of the procedure for your work requestors to step through the checklist before submitting the request. It’s not difficult to do if you have the proper work order/asset software. The checklist process should be in the request module.  If it’s not, then perhaps you should look for a system that has this basic functionality.

The productivity increase and money saved by avoiding these nuisance work orders can be quite substantial.  And the cost to implement this system is minimal.

I suggest you start by creating a checklist for a large group of assets. Let’s take Coolers for example. Any time a work order for a cooler is about to be submitted, the requestor should be presented with a list of things to check…

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I stumbled across an article while reviewing an audit of one of our clients, and thought I would share. This article was written by David Tod Geaslin. Mr. Geaslin is a consultant in the management of operation and maintenance and the CEO and owner of The Geaslin Group.

The Disastrous Effects of Deferring Maintenance

When we attempt to force maintenance spending into specific lumps of time that do not meet the needs of our machines, we create the need to defer maintenance. Maintenance budgets fail because final budgeting authorities do not understand the disastrous consequences of deferring maintenance. 

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Implementing a new software system should not, usually, require you to create a whole new business process. For example, when implementing work orders within TeamWORKS, the first thing we do is review the existing workflow. You’ve probably been doing work orders for quite some time and over the years your processes have been reviewed and refined to eliminate wasted time and wasted effort. An implementation should build on those past successes.

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As budgets and manpower shrink, maintenance managers are working to find ways to become more efficient. If your workers do not become more efficient the work cannot get done. The first casualty is preventive maintenance (PM). There is no immediate impact to stopping a PM program, however, in 3-5 years you will have added an additional 20% burden to your budget and work load. This cycle will continue to build upon itself. The alternative is to find ways to help maintenance professionals and tradesmen become more effective.

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