Companies in the transport and logistics sectors face severe time and equipment availability constraints. The maintenance of vehicles and machines and the management of spare parts inventories is therefore a major challenge and must be optimized so that the company remains competitive and meets its customers’ expectations. The use of a next-gen CMMS is one of the main ways to optimize maintenance in logistics, transport and freight.
Improve maintenance in transport and logistics with a CMMS solution
The use of a modern and efficient CMMS presents many advantages to improve and optimize the maintenance of logistics and transport.
Optimize the curative and preventive maintenance of logistics and transport
By using CMMS software, transport and logistics companies can improve the curative maintenance of their equipment, vehicles or machines. All of the company’s material assets can be listed, and each maintenance intervention recorded, in order to monitor the maintenance of each piece of equipment. Furthermore, communication and coordination between the different teams is much smoother, which allows maintenance technicians to be much more reactive and significantly reduces the downtime of vehicles and other assets.
Preventive maintenance is also much more efficient when using a CMMS software or application. The most recent CMMS solutions allow, for example, to set up preventive maintenance plans in order to reduce the frequency and duration of breakdowns and unexpected downtime, which greatly disrupt the operation of logistics flows.
Finally, the management of spare parts inventories can be controlled as closely as possible to requirements thanks to computer-assisted maintenance management, which avoids both overstocking and lack of parts during interventions.
Improve decision making using maintenance history
By adopting a CMMS software, transport and logistics companies can have a full history of maintenance operations for each of their equipment. In this detailed history lists you’ll find, for each intervention, the equipment concerned, the description and duration of the operation carried out, the technician who carried it out, and the type of maintenance to which it corresponds (curative, preventive, conditional maintenance, etc.). On some CMMS software, a label system facilitates the organization and analysis of the history.
Analyze your maintenance history in your CMMSThis tool significantly improves traceability, enabling companies to optimize their maintenance processes and increase productivity. It is a valuable decision-making aid, for example, for vehicle replacement.
Encourage buy-in from all teams
To be fully effective, any maintenance strategy requires the total involvement of all teams: maintenance technicians, but also drivers, mechanics, dispatchers, production operators, accountants, subcontractors, etc. This involvement is essential for the maintenance management tool used to be effective and for the information it collects to be qualitative and exhaustive.
An ergonomic and intuitive CMMS applicationThis is why the adoption of an ergonomic and easy-to-use CMMS solution is strongly recommended, in order to optimize maintenance in the logistics and transport sector. This tool must be both easy to take in hand and to adopt, but also facilitate, in concrete terms and in practice, the work of those who use it. A CMMS application that works in a similar way to everyday applications and is flexible in its use, by allowing the addition of all types of documents, in order to facilitate the transmission of information for example, will therefore be more effective than an archaic, complex and unintuitive computer tool.
Supply chain, innovation and industry 4.0
The current application of the latest technologies to manufacturing, logistics and transport has given rise to the concept of the “fourth industrial revolution,” also known as “Industry 4.0.” Technologies such as automation, IoT (Internet of Things) sensors, machine learning or artificial intelligence are transforming the way companies produce, maintain and distribute products and services. The supply chain plays a central role in this revolution in production and distribution methods.
In this context, the choice of high-performance IT tools that are adapted to current and future changes in the organization of industrial and service activities is particularly important, especially for logistics and transport companies. Thus, the use of outdated CMMS software, unable to process and analyze data transmitted by IoT sensors or to use the resources of artificial intelligence, can quickly become a limiting factor for improving the productivity and competitiveness of a company.
This is why the next-gen CMMS solutions, which fully integrate current technologies but are also designed to be able to adapt to future developments, are tending to replace traditional software in a growing number of companies, which are not able to meet the requirements of Industry 4.0.
