If they want to assert their presence on the market and stand out from their competitors, industries must be provided with the best tools and implement well-defined processes. One word then comes up: CMMS. But what is it about? Is there a real added value? This article provides you with some answers to help you make the right decision.
What does CMMS stand for?
A CMMS software (computerized maintenance management system) is an essential tool for all companies willing to optimize their industrial maintenance management and to become more reliable. Too many plants still only work with Excel files, in which maintenance teams only give in the intervention-related information they think is necessary.
This method, of course, has a lot of disadvantages: technicians cannot properly register all the information that is necessary to correctly follow all industrial maintenance operations, which means some tasks will be performed twice (pieces replacement, spare parts orders…) and that it will be impossible to have a global overview of all the plant’s activities. Technical teams don’t have the possibility to communicate efficiently with each other and don’t put all the operations in perspective to decide whether they should adapt their maintenance strategy or not.
In this context, a maintenance management software often becomes a vital tool to put communication back at the heart of the plant and to avoid information losses, which can have a disastrous impact on the whole production line, therefore challenging the entire company’s reliability.
With Mobility Work, maintenance teams organize their workday thanks to the agenda
CMMS: a comprehensive management system
Maintenance operations management thanks to a digital tool
The main advantage of such a solution is that it allows teams to track all their industrial maintenance operations or other activities in real time. Teams gain autonomy and use the tool to list, during the day, all the tasks they have been able to perform. Each operator, therefore, keeps track of his activity as well as the one of his colleagues’ and access an agenda to plan his activities and to establish maintenance plans.
Such a solution also allows each user to visualize all the breakdowns on the production line to keep track of all the defective equipment and of all the activities. Technicians and managers visualize them and become more aware of the several breakdowns occurring in their plant. Thanks to the maintenance management software, machine operators easily share information and gain time when they’re on the field as they only work on the equipment that truly requires it.
More concretely, production profiles can enter all the information they think is necessary to allow teams in charge to perform 1st-level maintenance. As a consequence, the operator is more aware of his responsibilities and the team can focus more on critical equipment. The aim here is to enhance their reaction time.
Why centralizing information is crucial
Making the information easily accessible to all the company’ services (maintenance, production, purchasing, store, accounting…) and allowing each user to have an overview of the data also helps to optimize the group’s processes.
To further share information, it is for instance possible to connect the maintenance management software to the company’s ERP, in order to follow all the inventory levels as well as the spare parts. This data is essential as it allows a plant to manage its costs better. If maintenance teams know everything about the information related to the spare parts, purchasing don’t have to place huge and useless orders, which would otherwise lead to major money losses. There is indeed a strong need for transversality, and not only for technicians on the field.
This principle is at the core of next-gen CMMS, which are radically different from more conventional tools, that became way too restrictive for companies willing to be always more innovative. Next-gen solutions even allow production operators to have access to all the maintenance-related activities of the company. Thanks to all the information given in by technicians, the tool becomes always more performing. In the equipment sheets available in the software, they can upload technical documents and other files, they register all the data about the machine (for example the date at which it was purchased) and access the whole intervention history.
CMMS users can also find this information when they look at the catalogs of the official suppliers registered on the platform. Thanks to these products, users can get access to the suppliers’ official documentation and can contact them if needed. They also have the possibility to copy these products in their equipment list without having to create them themselves as all the information is already provided by the supplier.
Enter the era of industry 4.0
Mobility Work, an example of next-gen CMMS
Nowadays, next-gen maintenance management software (like Mobility Work, an intuitive community-based maintenance management platform) are in line with this dynamic. This solution is available on your computer, tablet or smartphone and doesn’t need to be installed on your servers (it is SaaS solution, hosted in the Cloud).
Mobility Work stands out as it is so easy to use. All of the plant’s equipment can be uploaded within just a few minutes thanks to an import. You then have the possibility to simply install QR codes or NFC chips on your machines: just scan them to open the equipment sheets you are looking for. You’ll find all the information about the piece of equipment without even having to go back to the office in the plant: technical information, information history, associated maintenance plans, checklists…
Mobility Work is based on a community of users who exchange and follow their plant’s activity thanks to the newsfeed
Within just a few seconds, teams can therefore become way more efficient and keep informed about all the plant’s activity. The aim is to enhance communication between the various operators in order not to miss any crucial piece of information. Moreover, Mobility Work offers free read-only profiles to emphasize this notion of information sharing.
The power of community
Mobility Work CMMS is a maintenance management platform and the first industrial maintenance social network at the same time. This means that users enter information on a daily basis to become part of this database where everyone can find the answers they need. When they log in, technicians access a newsfeed where all the plant’s activities are gathered. Last interventions, breakdowns, repairs… They also receive notifications directly in the application and by e-mail when their colleagues assign them a task, for example.
We, at Mobility Work, had the idea to create such a community around industrial maintenance. This initiative builds on the fact that when a breakdown occurs in a plant that doesn’t have the needed spare parts to repair the piece of equipment, the teams are unable to check if the plants near it have the missing spare part in stock. Plants can manage the level of confidentiality of their equipment and share only the information they want to with plants of the same industrial group or with the entire Mobility Work community.
The platform encourages exchanges of expertise, good practices or spare parts in order to revolutionize the industrial maintenance world. Technicians and managers become real actors and register all their daily activities.
Thanks to all these users taking part in this process, the analytic tool available in the CMMS generates tables and graphs gathering, for instance, intervention times, the number of breakdowns, the spare parts output… Mobility Work makes it possible for the maintenance teams to access all this data to be able to adapt their maintenance strategy (curative, preventive, predictive, prescriptive…). As a conclusion, the application enhances your data-analysis capacity.
