The Advantages of Managing Multiple Operations with CMMS

Of the various elements to be stewarded in the day-to-day oversight of a suite of facilities, ensuring that maintenance equipment remains up and running is high on the list, and toward that end, managers have a crucial need to have an aerial view of the status of the external contracts that provide each site’s maintenance inventory.

Managing multiple maintenance inventory contracts could be likened to putting together the pieces of a puzzle. The borders could be the initial cost of the “as-designed” drawings of your maintenance inventory.  The next layer of the puzzle might be the “as-built” drawings and their additional costs.  The final layer, or the center of the puzzle, might be the “as-maintained” drawings and their concomitant costs.  To manage these, and do so with minimal time and effort, companies are using computerized maintenance management software (CMMS) to create a bird’s eye view of the lifecycle of each contract that can be accessed remotely and that continuously integrates real-time changes in each phase of that cycle.

Create a Helicopter View of Each Contract’s Lifecycle
The proverbial “paper trail” is a less-than-optimal solution for managers of multiple sites across wide geographical stretches.  Today’s managers need 360-degree solutions to view their properties and ensure continuity of service.  Towards that end, CMMS can provide a centralized location to view asset data throughout each asset’s lifecycle, by allowing managers to see in real-time a project’s trajectory from as-drawn, to as-designed, to as-built, and the related changes, such as refits and repairs, that need to be adjusted to reduce or eliminate downtime.  

Real-time Applications
Because CMMS integrates real-time progress reports into asset data (for example, alerting technicians once any repairs or replacements have been completed), inventory or equipment being serviced won’t require as much time to resume production.  Another feature of CMMS is the ability to notify users when project milestones are completed (e.g., liquidity events), enabling more efficient communication of required action amongst pertinent personnel.
CMMS can be deployed across mobile apps, adding another degree of immediacy to its’ utilization throughout an enterprise, greatly freeing managers to operate in real-time and with the utmost efficiency, whether they are on-site or in the field.
Your chosen asset management software can incorporate the lifecycle of the contract with each supplier within the application.  From the call for bids on the project, acceptance of the bid, to projected cash outlays and associated work performed by the contractor. The benefits of such an integrated system reach far beyond cash and contract management, by eliminating redundant data entry (and related costs) throughout a contract’s lifecycle.  


Asset Integrity Management
To address the issue of asset integrity, crucial to continuity of asset support, your chosen EAM can ensure that the same data set is used regardless of who may be accessing it to make changes to the status of a given asset.  For each asset, all relevant CAD drawings, contracts, maintenance schedules, testing reports and other documents can be stored in one central repository, and then in turn link to each asset within your CMMS.   To reinforce each asset’s integrity, EAM can include integrated permit and incident tracking modules to expedite upcoming work orders.  Using a system that does not support this level of integration can result in technicians expending excess time managing independent asset records, effectively diminishing each asset’s ROI.

This is the first in a series on The Advantages of Managing Multiple Operations with CMMS.