The Covid 19 outbreak and the containment measures taken to restrain it have profoundly disrupted the organization of the plants for an unknown amount of time. In this context, the maintenance of machinery and equipment must be rethought, and CMMS is becoming all the more essential.
Indeed, computerized maintenance management is even more useful when it comes to encouraging home working and managing maintenance teams that are often understaffed, while at the same time aiming to quickly restart plant activity.
Using high-performance CMMS software adapted to the situation allows maintenance managers to optimize team management, to organize the maintenance schedule as well as possible, and to ensure maximum efficiency for each intervention.
The health crisis, a challenge for maintenance managers
The current health situation and containment represent major challenges for managers in general, and for maintenance ones in particular.
Managing maintenance teams during Covid 19
The good relationship between a maintenance manager and his or her teams is based largely on trust. Technicians must have confidence in their manager’s ability to organize interventions so that they run smoothly and efficiently. For his part, the maintenance manager must have confidence in his or her teams and in their ability to carry out precise, serious and fast work.
In times of health crisis and social distancing, this trust can be undermined or more difficult to build and maintain. Indeed, home working is favored, some of the employees are partially unemployed and the number of technicians present in the field is reduced to a minimum.
CMMS: a valuable tool for good communication within maintenance teams
In this context, having a CMMS platform that integrates community operation is a real asset. This is the case of the Mobility Work application, which has a space for exchanges and communication between its various users. Inspired by social networks, the application offers, for example, a simplified newsfeed. This allows all the people involved to follow maintenance operations and obtain information in real time.
In addition, Mobility Work gives the opportunity to interact with each other, which strengthens the cohesion of teams that do not necessarily work in the same place on a daily basis.
Improve internal communication thanks to a collaborative CMMS platform
More generally, having a collaborative CMMS platform allows you to improve communication not only within the maintenance department, as it avoids repair delays or successive replacements of the same part, but also with other company departments (purchasing, production, etc.). The factors that lead to incidents, which are often linked to a lack of communication (difficulty in collaborating or obtaining validations) are thus drastically reduced.
Thanks to Mobility Work, information is centralized in a one and only maintenance tool for all employees involved in maintenance, and easily accessible to all. This sharing of information includes the possibility of tracking spare parts directly in the tool: maintenance teams are thus aware of all the information they need, which prevents the purchasing department from placing unnecessary orders.
CMMS and health crisis
Beyond the human aspect of managing maintenance teams, the health crisis is presenting maintenance managers with considerable logistical and organizational challenges. Their ability to rigorously and efficiently plan maintenance interventions is thus put to the test.
The importance of efficient interventions’ planning
When maintenance teams are operating with reduced personnel, the planning of interventions is even more important than usual. They must be carried out at the best possible time to cause the least possible disruption to production, and as quickly as possible by a small number of technicians.
Thanks to a CMMS application such as Mobility Work, task planning is much simpler. On PC, the “Scheduler” tool, which is only accessible to administrator profiles, allows you to view the intervention schedule of all maintenance technicians and to move tasks with a simple “drag and drop”. It is therefore very easy to plan all interventions efficiently.
In addition, a CMMS calendar, whether on a PC, smartphone or tablet, provides an overview of tasks already completed, those that are overdue, scheduled interventions, etc. It is even possible to consult the calendar of a particular piece of equipment.
CMMS at the service of predictive maintenance
Predictive maintenance helps to increase reliability and monitor machine performance as accurately as possible. Problems are detected even before they occur, allowing them to be resolved very quickly. Maintenance crews can repair and replace equipment before breakdowns occur or lead to serious or costly production problems.
In the context of the lockdown exit, while many plants will seek to quickly resume intense production rates, predictive maintenance will be a major tool. Indeed, it allows maintaining a high level of productivity by reducing machine downtime to a minimum.
Thanks to its advanced functions in terms of intervention planning and analysis, and to its community-based platform that allows users to benefit from a large amount of feedback on a given machine, the Mobility Work application can be a considerable asset for maintenance managers looking for maximum efficiency.
The advantages of mobile CMMS in times of containment
Home working has been strongly encouraged by the authorities to fight the coronavirus epidemic, and it will continue to be so in the coming months. Reducing the frequency of physical contact between teams is thus becoming a public health issue.
In this context, having a mobile CMMS tool is particularly useful. With a solution such as Mobility Work, maintenance managers can consult all the work carried out and planned at any time and from any device. They can also manage their teams remotely and monitor their interventions in real time. The analysis of activity reports is also made easier and remains possible even when teams work remotely.
Maintenance technicians, on the other hand, can use a simple smartphone to consult their tasks at any time and write up reports of performed interventions as soon as they are completed.
Far from being over, this troubled time undoubtedly represents the beginning of a longer period of particular constraints for the productive organization of factories. Maintenance managers and teams have to adapt to the new health regulations while ensuring the optimal productivity of their equipment.
