Facility Managers: Are You Listening To Your CMMS? 

How Facility Management can increase efficiency and save money by using a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management Software).

Sponsored by

CMMS TMA Systems

Consider this sobering statistic from a survey by Kris Bagadia of Maintenance Solutions: “My national survey of CMMS users indicates 94 percent of them use only 10 percent of the software’s capacity and features.”

Using only 10 percent of your Computerized Maintenance Management Solutions (CMMS) is like sitting on an unopened money box. That’s why smart facility managers capitalize on the wealth of CMMS data and features to help them save money and time. So let’s open that box of money and focus on how listening to your CMMS can help increase your organization’s productivity and profitability.

Talking About Your Assets

Your CMMS can be an invaluable source of asset data—everything from original cost and date of service to a physical location, maintenance schedules, repair history and costs, performance trends, and vendor records. Entering accurate and complete asset data into your CMMS and keeping the data current gives you a powerful decision-making tool. Asset data can help:

  • Create Preventive Maintenance (PM) and resulting work order schedules
  • Analyze asset usage trends for future asset-use planning
  • Track accurate records of emergency work orders and repair costs (both equipment & labor)
  • Keep track of equipment inspection histories for compliance or safety requirements

The gold mine of asset information in your CMMS helps you decide what maintenance strategy (or combination of strategies) will work best for each asset. Expensive equipment may best be served with a Predictive Maintenance plan and frequent inspections to avoid emergency repairs. A Run to Failure (RTF) approach could save time and money when dealing with cheap, “easy-to-procure and replace” assets.

CMMS TMA SystemsHarness CMMS Horsepower To Track Manpower

Labor costs make up a significant portion of your facility maintenance budget. Using your CMMS to track and manage your workforce can dramatically impact productivity and performance.

Work order modules make up the core of a good computerized maintenance management system.

By effectively using your CMMS work order system, you can:

  • Create Preventive Maintenance (PM) work orders based on predetermined criteria for each asset
  • Generate Demand Maintenance (DM) work orders to respond to service requests, emergency repairs, or other non-routine maintenance tasks
  • Utilize the CMMS master maintenance scheduling for all current, overdue, and upcoming work orders to help plan for equipment, labor, and resource availability
  • Reduce unplanned overtime by reassigning labor hours based on availability and work order priorities
  • Allocate work orders according to skill sets and experience for optimal matching of an employee to the work assigned
  • Track labor productivity levels for the under-performing staff or other issues

Adding mobile capabilities to your CMMS work order modules can dramatically improve maintenance efficiency. Work orders can be sent to a mobile device, where they can be received, processed, and updated in “real time.” Employees can enter new work orders in the field and perform asset inspections and inventory management.

CMMS Reporting: The Facility Manager’s Secret Weapon

CMMS reports and KPI (Key Performance Indicator) functions allow you to turn data into valuable information for improved strategic decision-making and planning across all organizational levels. For instance, inventory management reports give you information for automatic reordering points based on historical data and future forecasting. Tracking rising repair trends for equipment can help anticipate asset “end of life” and build asset replacement costs into strategic maintenance budget planning.

Trend analysis from your CMMS reports can provide data for establishing maintenance “best practices” and setting up facility standard operating procedures (SOPs) throughout the organization. This is handy for new employee training, especially as the older workers retire, taking their “knowledge capital” with them.

CMMS: Listening To Your Bottom Line

Effective facility management requires a synergistic blend of strategic and operational planning and quick, informed decision-making responding to ever-changing facility conditions.

Listening to your CMMS allows you to adopt a continual process improvement methodology for your facility management. Using the data to make intelligent shifts in your approach to asset management can lead to improved performance, productivity, and profitability. That should make every facility manager want to listen up.

What CMMS Software Is Right For You?

TMA Systems is a leading developer of Computerized Maintenance Management Solutions (CMMS) and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) for the worldwide facility market.  TMA Systems offers a wide range of integrated asset management functions, including work order generation, inventory tracking, and labor and purchasing functions, with client/server and web-based options.

To learn more, contact one of our team members.
Call us at +1.918.858.6600 or email marketing@tmasystems.com.


Click here to read more facility management news from TMA Systems.