March/April 2006
Computerized maintenance management systems can bring order to the process of making repairs, ordering parts, and scheduling labor, which can have a positive effect on the bottom line.
By Kris Bagadia
Maintenance tends to be an afterthought—if it’s thought about at all. It’s just something that has to be done when a piece of equipment breaks. But it deserves more respect and attention. After all, proper maintenance is the backbone of any operations that are dependent on equipment—like scrap recycling facilities.
Most managers consider maintenance a cost center: They want to stay within their maintenance budget or, at most, reduce expenses. Instead, they should view maintenance as a profit center because the proper investment in maintenance can result in higher profits. How? Properly maintained equipment can be operated for more hours, can be used at a higher capacity, can produce higher-quality materials, and can have a longer lifespan than poorly maintained equipment. All these qualities can increase productivity, thus increasing profitability.
A computerized maintenance management system can facilitate proper equipment maintenance, helping ensure that maintenance adds value, not just costs, to a scrap operation. This software for tracking the who, what, when, where, and how of equipment maintenance can help recycling operations ensure that maintenance is an equal contributor to the strength of the bottom line.
CMMS Benefits
A computerized maintenance management system is simply computer software designed to assist in the planning, management, and administration of all elements of equipment maintenance. It can help maintenance managers answer questions such as
• How often is this equipment out of service and for how long?
• Where did we buy the last spare part? How much did we pay? What’s the typical delivery time?
• How many times should we repair this equipment before replacing it?
• Do we have the necessary information to plan maintenance operations?
The answers to those questions might be in someone’s head, in a file cabinet, or both, but a CMMS can put those answers at the maintenance manager’s fingertips, improving the speed and efficiency of maintenance and repairs.
When implemented successfully, a CMMS has benefits beyond keeping the machines humming. It can improve labor productivity by ensuring that maintenance workers know the procedures for safe maintenance and repairs and that they have the parts and tools they need, allowing them to work with fewer delays and interruptions. This can lead to less use of overtime or contract work, a reduced maintenance backlog, and even better morale.
A CMMS can improve inventory control by eliminating excessive or obsolete inventory and ensuring the availability of parts. By stocking only the parts it needs, a company might reduce inventory costs 10 percent or more. And a CMMS can improve environmental control in terms of compliance with safety and regulatory standards. By documenting the proper maintenance and repair procedures for each piece of equipment, the system can potentially prevent accidents or fines.
Common Features
Many software products address maintenance management, either as a module of broader facility management software or as a stand-alone product. In general, CMMS products offer the following features:
Equipment Management: This module contains a record of each piece of equipment as well as its location, spare parts, run time, safety procedures, preventive maintenance schedule, and relationship to other equipment, if any. Each equipment record can contain a complete maintenance history through its work orders, making it easier and faster to decide whether to repair or replace that particular machine.
Preventive Maintenance: Most equipment requires periodic maintenance to ensure efficient, uninterrupted operations. A preventive maintenance module creates PM records and generates work orders containing a description of the task and the needed materials and labor. The system can generate such work orders based on a calendar date or equipment-based criteria such as hours, revolutions, or miles.
Labor: This module tracks information such as hourly wages for maintenance employees to allow the calculation of work-order costs. It can categorize employees by craft (for example, mechanics) and administer shift, vacation, and sick time information for scheduling purposes. It could even generate time cards for maintenance employees.
Work Orders: The work order is the heart of a CMMS. With this module, users can generate, print, and complete work orders. It stores all preventive and corrective maintenance work orders for current, planned, and completed work. It can also estimate costs using the system’s stored information on labor, parts, and other costs.
Vendors: This module stores contact information for the companies that supply parts, equipment, or maintenance services, as well as their payment terms.
Inventory Control: Managing inventory is an important part of maintaining any facility. This module tracks spare parts in stock and their locations, indicates when stock falls to the reorder point, and creates purchase orders to restock needed items in specified quantities.
Purchase Orders: This module creates and processes purchase requisitions and purchase orders to place, receive, and track orders for both materials and services.
Finding the Right CMMS
If you’re convinced that a computerized maintenance management system would benefit your scrap operation, the next step is choosing among the many software vendors to find the product that best fits your needs. The following 10-step process will help you focus your search.
1. Form a Team —Draw together workers from maintenance, information technology, purchasing, accounting, and other areas concerned with equipment labor, parts, and procedures. Getting broad participation at this stage can increase acceptance and use of the system.
2. Identify Maintenance Problems —A clear idea of current problems can reinforce the need for a new system as well as indicate the features you require. Brainstorm a list of existing problems a CMMS might be able to solve, such as the following:
• excessive equipment downtime,
• spare parts out of stock when needed,
• excess inventory of obsolete parts,
• preventive maintenance not performed consistently,
• maintenance worker overtime costs too high,
• no budget or support for specialized training,
• work orders contain incomplete or erroneous information,
• equipment history and maintenance records are disorganized, and/or
• no long-term plan for equipment replacement.
3. Set System Objectives —Use the list of problems to define what you want the CMMS to accomplish. For example, if one problem is excessive inventory, then the related objective would be to reduce inventory. When setting objectives, think about the scope of the project. Will the company use the software for one site or multiple sites? Will the software track all equipment or just big-ticket items? Also, think both short range and long range. A typical short-term objective might be to have computerized inventory control within a year of implementation, whereas a long-term objective might be to increase maintenance productivity 10 percent over the next five years.
4. Translate Objectives Into Desired Features —Determine how you need the software to function to produce the desired results. For the above example, the software needs an inventory control feature to meet the short-term objective. Don’t limit yourself to automating existing procedures. Think broadly about how such software might improve maintenance productivity.
Prioritize your list of features in three groups: mandatory, preferred, and desired. Think long term here, as well: A feature that seems desirable now might prove mandatory as the company grows. You also can rank the features’ importance on a scale of one to 10. Mandatory features get a 10, preferred features are ranked between four and nine, and desired features, one to three.
Use this list of features and their relative importance as your system specifications. You can submit this to vendors to obtain their product and pricing information.
5. Decide Whether to Build or Buy —Once you know what features you need from a CMMS, there are two approaches to getting the right product: developing the software yourself or purchasing an existing product.
In-house development, either by your technology staff or by contractors, gives you increased flexibility because you can design the software exactly how you want it. A custom-designed program might better fit your maintenance operations and your existing information systems. But custom systems have disadvantages as well. The costs tend to be higher, and the product will take longer to develop. The product might not live up to the high expectations of those who envisioned it. And often such software is poorly documented, leaving the company dependent on the knowledge and skills of the people who developed it.
With dozens, if not hundreds, of CMMS vendors to choose from, you can probably find an off-the-shelf
product to fit your company’s needs. The exception might be a company with unusual or highly specialized equipment, or one that already has a home-grown information management system with which the existing CMMS software would need to interact. But ready-made software offers significant benefits: It’s relatively inexpensive, requires no development time, and is quicker to implement. Vendors update their products regularly to use the latest technology or offer new features, and often they have user groups and other support methods.
The remainder of these steps assume you’ve decided to buy, not build.
6. Search for Potential CMMS Vendors —The first place to look is to the vendors of any specialized information management software you already use. Do those companies have an existing CMMS product or one under development? If not, ask for recommendations from industry colleagues, look in maintenance-related trade journals,
or search online under “CMMS” or “computer maintenance management systems.” Compile a list of 10 to 12 vendors to investigate further. Gather literature on those vendors’ products and review their literature and Web sites to determine if their systems offer your mandatory features. Narrow down your list to three or four top
candidates.
7. Evaluate the Finalists —At this point you’ll want to meet with the vendors and get a demonstration of their products. Develop a rating sheet to evaluate each product based on how well its features measure up to your expectations. Beyond the features related to your objectives, consider the product’s additional qualifications in terms of flexibility, interactivity, security, and ease of use, among other things.
• Flexibility: The software should accommodate the screens, data fields, reports, and terminology you need. Flexibility in terms of growth is important as well: How many records can the system accept before its search and reporting features slow to a crawl? Is it written in a common programming language or something that’s obscure or obsolete?
• Interactivity: Consider whether the software will need to work with other programs, such as accounting and payroll. Can it export data in common formats? Also, will it require extensive programming to interface with your existing systems?
• Ease of Use: After training, a worker should be able to use the program without consulting a manual or other outside sources. On-screen instructions should explain what the program will do and how to use it. The program should be icon- and menu-driven, should contain input screens to enter information in an orderly manner, and should provide error handling and context-sensitive help.
• Security: If the system will contain sensitive information, determine whether its security features are
adequate.
• Hardware Compatibility: Ensure that the software works with your existing hardware or, if not, that you’ve accounted for the costs of upgraded hardware in the total price.
• Support: The vendor should offer training on its product, either at its offices or on site, and it should provide product documentation. Also consider ongoing support: Is support available during regular office hours? Is live, real-time support free or an additional charge? What are the terms of the warranty?
8. Evaluate the Vendor’s Qualifications— You want a vendor that’s both knowledgeable and experienced when it comes to CMMS. The vendor should have a track record in the business and exhibit a degree of financial strength. A CMMS project can be a major investment in time, resources, and money, so you don’t want to invest in a company just to see it go out of business the next year. Ask for and check each company’s references.
9. Total All Expected Costs —The price of the actual software is only part of the total project cost. Make sure you know the projected additional costs for program modifications, new hardware, installation and testing, training, data entry, ongoing software maintenance, and upgrades, among other things. These can add substantially to the total cost of the project.
10. Make Your Decision —Once you’ve completed the above steps, you should be ready to compile the results, compare the vendor and product finalists, and pick the product that seems best for you.
Add-On Technologies
Additional technologies can increase the ability of a CMMS to track equipment and parts and facilitate the capture and dissemination of valuable maintenance information. Depending on a company’s size and geographic reach, a CMMS could reside on a single computer or on one or more networked servers that make it accessible throughout the company. For the greatest accessibility, a Web-based CMMS allows workers to access the system from any computer with an Internet connection. A Web-based CMMS also is likely to cost less, be easier to upgrade, and offer better security in terms of both information backup and security from viruses.
Of course, scrap workers don’t always have immediate access to a desktop computer. Fortunately, many CMMS programs interact with laptop computers and personal digital assistants such as pocket PCs and Palm Pilots. Such devices give workers the essential maintenance information at the point of performance, making it more likely that they’ll follow proper procedures and document their activity. Portable computing equipment can also minimize or eliminate the need for paperwork.
Many scrap facilities are familiar with bar coding and radio frequency identification tags for tracking shipments of scrap. A CMMS can use the same technology to track equipment and parts. Bar coding and RFID offer the same benefits for maintenance as they do for scrap materials: reduced data entry, increased accuracy, less paperwork, and enhanced record-keeping.
A Final Caveat
A computerized maintenance management system is not the solution to every maintenance woe. The system is only as good as its data, thus good planning, implementation, and training are essential to ensure that workers know how to use the system and understand the value in collecting and entering the data. And no matter how efficiently a CMMS operates, it can’t prevent or predict every breakdown. When breakdowns do occur, however, a CMMS can make it more likely that a facility will have the people, tools, and parts it needs to make the repair quickly and correctly.
Kris Bagadia is principal of PEAK Industrial Solutions LLC (www.cmmsmadeeasy.com), a software systems and consulting firm based in Brookfield, Wis.
Computerized maintenance management systems can bring order to the process of making repairs, ordering parts, and scheduling labor, which can have a positive effect on the bottom line.