A maintenance manager’s load is immense. He or she must deal with equipment failure, equipment downtime, inefficiencies, team safety issues, compliance regulations, and more.

Being able to monitor the power within assets can help reduce this load. Through power monitoring, maintenance managers can better understand the health of a machine’s electrical performance, enabling many problems to be discovered early enough to be resolved.

Maintenance managers can take power monitoring to the next level when integrating it with a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). A CMMS is a solution for managing work orders, PM schedules, and parts inventory.

By combining hardware and software such as the Fluke 3540 FC Three-Phase Power Monitor and eMaint CMMS, managers can gain a complete picture of maintenance activity and asset health in one place—all accessible remotely.

Equipped with this holistic view and valuable data, a maintenance manager can make better decisions, save time, and more efficiently manage assets.

Here are the top five benefits of integrating a CMMS with power monitoring:

  1. Extend the life of assets

    Think about the maintenance required for your car. You extend the life of your vehicle by keeping accurate maintenance records of the work performed and measuring the oil performance.

    Power monitoring works in a similar way. The Fluke 3540 FC is a compact device used to monitor and measure critical electrical parameters for three-phase machinery. It streams the data to the Fluke Connect Cloud. The Fluke 3540 FC accesses data from anywhere, allowing teams to make critical decisions about asset health.

    Integrating the Fluke Connect condition-monitoring data with eMaint gives a comprehensive view of the maintenance activity. The eMaint CMMS provides a repository of information on a facility’s assets, including a history of work performed, technical documents, and parts required to service the assets correctly.

    Managing the work execution makes for an optimal use of resources. Better tracking through the use of power monitoring data and a CMMS will ultimately extend the life of your assets.

  2. Reduce maintenance costs

    Reactive maintenance ─ which means acting only when something fails or shuts down ─ typically increases costs due to labor overtime and expedited parts. By getting insights from a CMMS about asset decline, you get an early warning of impending potential problems, resulting in extra time to order parts if needed.

    Moving work from reactive to planned maintenance allows for resources to be scheduled and overtime avoided. Real-time data from a CMMS with power monitoring leads to informed decisions.

  3. Increase worker productivity

    Prioritizing the day gives maintenance teams the ability to focus on the highest priority work and avoid interruption due to emergencies or fire drills.

    From the start, a technician should have the right tools and review the technical documentation to work on a specific asset. A technician called for emergency corrective work someplace else in the facility might not have the correct tools and parts at hand to complete the repair. This leads to wasting limited resources with non-wrench time activities.

  4. Reduce unplanned downtime

    Knowing the condition of equipment and planning for repairs in advance before a machine fails provides the maintenance manager with better control of the plant. It also can help avoid workday disruptions that shutdown operations and costs company significantly in productivity gaps and losses.

    Troubleshooting with the Fluke 3540 FC allows teams to identify potential power issues before equipment downtime occurs. Users can chart or graph measurements to show fluctuations during a monitoring period. Alarms can be programmed and sent to teams when assets exceed or fall below certain thresholds.

  5. Meet compliance and safety standards

    Compliance reporting comes from regulatory agencies, insurance companies, and key customers. Bringing the power monitoring data into the CMMS provides alerts or warnings for asset health.

    The Fluke 3540 FC promotes safety. Maintenance teams can avoid entering hazardous or dangerous or hard-to-reach areas by installing the non-invasive, wireless, and portable 3540 FC device. Bringing the power monitoring data into the CMMS provides alerts or warnings for asset health.

    Reactive maintenance drives the behavior of continually responding to breakdowns. A safety manager once shared that “planned maintenance is three times as safe as unplanned maintenance.”

Learn more about integrating power monitoring capabilities with eMaint CMMS.