Maintenance with and without a CMMS

Maintenance managers who live in a reactive mode without a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) often spend their days putting out fires. They deal with emergency repairs, breakdowns, inefficiencies, and high maintenance costs.

The following two scenarios illustrate a day in the life of a maintenance manager’s workday with and without the eMaint CMMS.

Day in the life of maintenance without eMaint CMMS

7 a.m.

Wake up an hour early due to another machine breaking during the night.

7:30 a.m.

While bleary-eyed, look at the machine to diagnose the issue before the rest of the team arrives. Then, review past paperwork and Excel records to see if other technicians have corrected this same problem before.

8:30 a.m.

Find a relevant work order (WO) that shows what technicians did to fix this same issue months ago.

8:45 a.m.

Now find a technician to fix this problem again. Use the paper calendar to determine which technician can do the job.

9:15 a.m.

Waste a half hour to find the available technician(s) due to the random notes on the cluttered calendar.

9:30 a.m.

The technicians begin repairing the machine. In the meantime, new equipment comes in. Review its manuals, determine the PM schedules, and then write this on paper or an Excel sheet.

12:30 p.m.

During the daily plant walkthrough, take notice of a few light bulbs that have gone out. Make a mental note to write a WO request later for the bulbs.

1 – 3 p.m.

Create a report that shows the work the technicians performed on the machine from this morning. Then, include the total cost of repairs from the past year.

4 p.m.

The technician did not write down the parts and quantities used to fix the machine this morning—review inventory now to determine the parts used and reorder these.

5:30 p.m.

Start driving home and realize the lightbulb request didn’t get sent in—hopefully, will remember to do this tomorrow.

Day in the life of maintenance with eMaint CMMS

8 a.m.

Wake up and check open WOs for the day directly on your mobile device. Notice that four machines have a PM for today. Then, check the daily automated reports that show the number of hours each technician works for the day.

8:30 a.m.

Arrive at the office and schedule out the four PM WOs to the technician with the least number of hours. The technician then accesses the WOs on his tablet, walks over to the machine to complete the first WO, and “signs on” to the job to automatically track his labor.

9 a.m.

During the daily plant walkthrough, use your mobile device to scan the request QR code for several light bulbs that have gone out. Fill in the work request and mark the department as  “Facility.” Once saved, the maintenance person in charge of the Facilities Department receives an email about this.

10 a.m.

A machine breaks down—use the historical work order data in eMaint to perform a sufficient Root Cause Analysis (RCA). Based on the RCA, implement an action plan to remedy this. Access the technician workload report to see who is available.

11 a.m.

After technicians fix the machine, create a report to see the machine’s year-to-date cost of repairs. Consider replacing the equipment based on the results.

1 p.m.

Receive an email to reorder three items used today (based off the item’s reorder point within eMaint). Create the PO within eMaint. Accounting receives the email about the items as well and handles the ordering. Once the parts arrive, easily and quickly receive the parts into inventory by scanning the barcodes with the eMaint parts checkout feature and, if necessary, attach them directly to the corresponding WO in the system.

2 p.m.

Upper management wants to know which pieces of equipment have had the most amount of work completed as well as which ones have cost the most to repair. Use eMaint’s report builder to create these reports. Call the eMaint support team for assistance with one of the reports, and they quickly help in creating it.

2:30 p.m.

Get an email that says the request for light bulb changes has been approved and is now a work order.

3-5 p.m.

Have meetings throughout the afternoon. Find out a new machine needs a PM routine setup. Use eMaint’s “Distribute PMs” feature to copy the PM schedules from a similar asset and quickly distribute them to any other asset in the system.

5:30 p.m.

Upon leaving, an email notification comes through that shows the technicians completed the request put in this morning.

The two scenarios provide an eye-opening view of how much a CMMS can impact an organization’s time and resources, ultimately resulting in cost-savings and a more stress-free environment.

With eMaint CMMS software, a maintenance manager’s workday no longer consists of continually putting out fires. Instead, their workday includes flexibility, planning, and necessary reporting tools to do the job successfully. Replace inefficiencies with reliability today.

To learn more, please contact one of our eMaint CMMS customer service managers for a personalized demo.