While CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management Systems) are traditionally used in industrial environments, any kind of field or organization can benefit from this kind of software. The key is choosing the right solution to optimize your machine maintenance. It’s in hospitals and medical organizations’ best interest to adopt this type of software in order to face the challenges of their industry.
Why all hospital maintenance must be optimized
Maintenance plays a key role in the activity of any structure, no matter the field. The organization depends on dedicated teams whose tasks will vary depending on the medical environment they work in. Medical laboratories, hospitals or even assisted living facilities are just some of the players that have a vested interest in adopting a CMMS in order to face their many challenges.
If you want to optimize your machine maintenance management you have to find software adapted to your needs that will help you save time by gathering all inspection and activity data in one place. All too often, maintenance professionals, no matter their field, still manage their tasks in Excel though they quickly discover the flaws of that system.
As part of their activities, maintenance professionals are often on the move. Going back and forth to fill out information about the tasks they are doing is not only a waste of time but it also increases the risk of committing a mistake. Since they can’t enter the data directly, professionals are more likely to omit information and submit unclear reports. This makes it harder for their colleagues to follow up on past inspections or interventions and increases the probability of making a mistake, duplicating tasks or ordering the same material twice.
Moreover, tasks will be poorly executed due to a lack of readily available documentation. Needless to say that without a tool designed to adapt to maintenance in a medical or hospital setting, the different departments struggle to communicate and cooperation is non-existent.
Managing your resources in your CMMS
It is important that maintenance staff continuously monitor all of the organization’s equipment to keep everything in working order. However, that is only possible with the right software.
Register all your equipment
The main advantage of a maintenance management solution is the ability to register all of your equipment and medical supplies in the solution. As it happens, medical teams have many assets to manage, and must organize themselves to receive and install new equipment if they want to guarantee optimal traceability. The equipment requires maintenance at regular intervals therefore their maintenance management needs to be closely monitored.
A CMMS helps you meet these requirements by keeping track of all your equipment and tools: picture, location, detailed equipment sheet… All this information helps speed up your activities. Thanks to this easily accessible data, equipment becomes more readily available which is critical in a medical or hospital setting.
Ensure compliance with procedures
Maintenance also helps ensure constant compliance with the various procedures in a medical environment, for instance based on the manufacturer’s recommendations. Equipment for the medical field is rather sensitive and ensuring the safety of both patients and staff is the number one priority. Using maintenance management software, you can upload all the manufacturer files and compliance documents to the software so that you can easily access them at any time to ensure compliance. Certain next-gen solutions also allow users to create checklists which is particularly useful to help the teams follow proper procedure.
Use your software to keep track of all intervention and verification reports and, more generally, of all operations carried out on the equipment. In order for teams to comply with strict procedures and technical inspections, there must be a complete history of activities and tasks available. As each user creates new tasks and activities within the tool, they’re recorded and can be viewed in the history. This provides a better visibility of the maintenance department’s activities.
This kind of solution finally addresses one of the basic needs for medical institutions: the need for in-house professionals who are both flexible and excellent technicians.
Maintenance, a bastion of safety
Once again, it is of vital importance that maintenance teams ensure the safety, especially electrical safety, of users, patients and equipment to protect them from all harm. To do so, they will have to monitor the electrical circuits using various technology. Whether they decide to install sensors on the equipment or gravitate towards techniques like infrared thermography: adopting a maintenance management software is key.
Mobility Work allows operators and technicians to be independent: task creation, maintenance plans, notifications for every new activity…
The Mobility Work CMMS mobile SaaS platform, available on PC, smartphone and tablet, enables users to connect their sensors with the app using public APIs for example. The sensors measure different indicators and, thanks to a notification system, alert you when values exceed the set limit. As a result, whenever the slightest anomaly or malfunction is detected, maintenance teams are able to react in a few seconds.
Within the software you can also create counters, for instance, to monitor your machine’s energy consumption or other data according to your needs. This gives users greater independence when they have to work on equipment and makes them more flexible. All the data they need is just a swipe away. This easy access improves teams’ reaction time and, therefore, increases the availability of equipment and tools.
Why are next-gen CMMS tools better suited to hospital maintenance than traditional solutions?
Organizations are often tempted to trust familiar conventional programs even though these are unnecessarily complicated for users. Users are the first to say that these programs are counter-intuitive, impossible to learn, extremely expensive and what’s more, they require hours of training.
Next-gen solutions are the polar opposite of these outdated systems: pleasant and user friendly, these solutions are easily adopted by teams. As a community-based solution, Mobility Work CMMS is a next-gen tool that requires no training.
Ensuring better interconnectivity between departments
While the personnel responsible for asset maintenance often needs to be versatile, they must also communicate with different departments and maintain a certain connectivity between them.
Mobility Work users can access product catalogues showcased by the suppliers and manufacturers themselves. Not only can the procurement function keep an eye on the different teams’ maintenance needs, it can also access consumables and other products directly within the maintenance management tool thanks to the product catalogues. Users are able to view different product sheets, suppliers and manufacturers and get in touch with them in-app.
The Mobility Work offer includes different types of profiles, some of which are free (service provider or intervention seeker), adapted for departments other than maintenance. Thanks to this variety, the procurement function benefits from better visibility on maintenance activities and can anticipate the needs reported. Consequently, orders can be placed faster and delivery times as well as maintenance costs can go down.
This interconnectivity, made possible thanks to next-gen maintenance management solutions, makes interdepartmental collaboration that much simpler, particularly for the bioengineering department which is in high demand. Maintenance is an important concern for this department in charge of controlling biological systems as well as developing diagnostic and patient treatment devices. An adaptive solution will therefore help meet this essential need.
Following your interventions reliably and efficiently in yout CMMS
In other words, equipping the teams in charge of equipment maintenance with a CMMS solution will make their interventions easier, increase the availability of the machines, guarantee the safety of the healthcare staff and patients as well as ensure smooth maintenance.
From a human standpoint, communication between maintenance personnel and other departments becomes more fluid. The various stakeholders can keep track of all the activities performed and access all the compliance documents they need, reducing the risk of human error and ensuring reliable maintenance follow-up.
In maintenance terms, the teams are able to improve task planning management as well as access all the indicators and report they need within the tool. The main advantage of solutions like Mobility Work, is the Dashboard feature: an integrated analytical tool that compiles all the data input by users and presents it in graph form to help you monitor your performance indicators.
Mobility Work is provided with an analytic tool to help you analyze all your maintenance data and adapt your strategy.
Within this analytical tool, you will find information about the equipment that has required the most hours of work, the most operations… All this data helps you take a step back from your maintenance operations to identify potential difficulties: the tool provides this data to help you make strategic decisions (type of maintenance strategy, whether or not to replace certain machines, etc.).
