Maintenance management software can help you optimize your business’ asset and facility management and achieve reduced downtime, increased asset lifecycle and higher ROI.
Understanding Maintenance Management and Maintenance Management Software
Maintenance management is the process of effectively maintaining your assets and resources in order to increase asset life, decrease unplanned downtime and maximize the efficiency of your maintenance operations.
Today, maintenance management efforts are effectively executed using a robust maintenance management software like:
- A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS)
- CMMS Software
- An enterprise asset management system (EAM)
- An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system
Many modern and full-featured systems today contain functionalities of all three tools.
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Pen and paper, Excel files, disconnected legacy systems – they’re all still widely in use today, and they’re crippling many maintenance management endeavors by causing recurring pain points like:
- Reactive maintenance practices
- Costly delays in production
- Safety and compliance concerns
- Difficulty managing people and processes
- High equipment downtime
- Difficulty meeting KPIs and metrics
The right maintenance management software can help your organization overcome these pain points by developing effective preventive maintenance strategies. Using a CMMS, you can effectively manage work orders, automate scheduling processes, conduct maintenance management tasks on mobile devices and follow other best practices.
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Maintenance Management Software Benefits
Reduced Downtime
Stepping away from reactive maintenance practices and moving toward regularly scheduled preventive maintenance can increase equipment availability, eliminate rework, extend asset life and slash unplanned downtime.
Maximized Compliance and Audit Readiness
The right CMMS software can help maintenance and facility management teams stay prepared for audits and changing compliance regulations. Use the software, specifically, to establish SOPs for health and safety, to track employee training and compliance, to keep an accurate record of tasks and to manage permits and audit documents.
Lower Costs
A CMMS maintenance management software can cut costs by streamlining key processes, including inventory management, work order management, purchase order management and preventive maintenance strategies.
Better Team Management
Many maintenance management software solutions offer features that simplify team management, including key and lock management, mobile access, device-agnostic user interface, technology ticketing, API access and more.
Effective Preventive Maintenance Strategies
A CMMS can help standardize preventive tasks and manage the information needed to execute forward-thinking preventive maintenance strategies.
Maintenance Management Software Features
Work Order Management
Work order management allows you to proactively create, check, track, prioritize and assign work orders across locations and devices. This can ultimately improve maintenance processes and increase employee efficiency.
Mobile Capabilities
Allowing operators and technicians to input information and view critical documentation on-site can increase efficiency, decrease delays and help ensure that documents are up-to-date and always complete.
MRO Inventory and Spare Parts Management
Overstock, hard-to-find parts and missing inventory can skyrocket costs and negatively impact efficiency and the execution of work orders. Effective parts management, on the other hand, can save time, reduce costs and avoid costly mistakes.
Reports and Dashboards
Actionable data and insights can help you identify weaknesses, improve your processes and ultimately create effective preventive and proactive maintenance plans.
Comprehensive Integrations
If your tools cannot effectively integrate with one another, your business will deal with incomplete information, missing information, delays and more. Maintenance Connection integrates with your mission-critical tools to sidestep these concerns.
Enterprise Asset Management
Maintenance Connection has robust enterprise asset management features so you can not only improve your maintenance but also increase asset health throughout the asset lifecycle.
Full-Featured Security
Ensure compliance, protect yourself against cyber threats and manage your permissions effectively with Maintenance Connection’s fully customizable security features.
Maintenance Management Software Industries
Maintenance management software can help organizations in many asset-heavy industries to streamline their asset management, maximize productivity and ultimately increase uptime and ROI.
Industrial & Manufacturing
Maintenance Connection CMMS can help industrial teams and plant technicians manage their plant’s health comprehensively in order to decrease equipment downtime and effectively manage assets across devices and locations. This can ultimately reduce equipment failures, diminish maintenance costs and more.
Hospitality
An excellent guest experience in resorts and hotels requires that everything is running smoothly behind the scenes. A robust maintenance management software can facilitate these efforts by helping users track and schedule service requests, reduce maintenance costs, keep important equipment (like swimming pools, fitness equipment, elevators and dining equipment) running and more.
Healthcare
Asset maintenance in the healthcare industry isn’t just about increasing effectiveness and lowering costs – it’s about patient safety. The right maintenance management software can help professionals in the healthcare industry to reduce downtime on critical assets, minimize inventory stockout and overages, improve efficiency and ultimately facilitate patient care.
Education
In higher education, facility and asset management involves preventive maintenance schedules and procedures for a facility and equipment like theaters, libraries, labs, classrooms, dorms, administrative offices and athletic facilities. A CMMS can facilitate this maintenance, helping to establish preventive maintenance schedules and ensuring that service requests are completed quickly and proactively.
Government
Government operations face many ongoing maintenance pain points, including disparate records, high downtime, out of control budgets and poor asset management. Maintenance management software and reports can help resolve these concerns by automating maintenance requests, generating data-driven reports and more.
Retail
A maintenance management system can help retail outlets and chains develop preventive maintenance schedules for all of their assets, including: POS systems, signs, pipes, ceiling fans, HVAC units, computers, lighting and more. This can ultimately help stores deliver a consistently excellent customer experience.
Frequently Asked Questions About Maintenance Management Software
What is CMMS maintenance software?
A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) is an enterprise business system that helps companies automate, digitize and optimize their maintenance operations. The right CMMS solution can help your business solve your most pressing pain points so you can effectively prioritize work orders, decrease equipment downtime, maximize employee efficiency and manage your budget – and from one comprehensive, centralized solution.
What is maintenance management?
Maintenance management is the process of maintaining an organization’s assets, facilities and resources. Effective maintenance management is generally achieved using a maintenance management software like a CMMS or an EAM, which can help:
- Standardize preventive and predictive maintenance practices
- Centralize important data and documentation
- Maximize transparency and collaboration
- Integrate key facility and asset management systems
- Maximize safety, compliance and employee productivity
What is the best CMMS software?
When finding the best CMMS software for your business, it’s important to keep in mind your business’ unique position and your needs. More specifically, consider your:
- Budget: How much money can you spend on a CMMS and how does it fit in to your 1, 3 and 5-year budget goals?
- Broader technological ecosystem: Does the CMMS you’re looking at integrate well with your existing practices and systems?
- IT capabilities: Does your IT team have the technical know-how to effectively operation your CMMS system? Would they benefit more from an on-premise system or cloud adoption?
- UX: If your technicians, operators and plant managers do not like the CMMS’ user interface, they will not use it – and low user adoption largely defeats the purpose of a CMMS. Keep this in mind when selecting a system and make sure that your team is on board.
What is Maintenance Management Information System?
The term computerized maintenance management information system (CMMIS) is simply another word for computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), an enterprise software solution designed to help organizations manage their assets and execute effective preventive maintenance strategies.
What are the 4 types of maintenance?
There are four general types of maintenance philosophies, though there is some flexibility when it comes to descriptions and naming conventions. These include:
- Corrective maintenance: This type of maintenance is carried out when an anomaly or flaw is detected. The goal of this maintenance practice is to fix the flaw and maintain uptime. Corrective maintenance tasks may be more cost-effective than preventive maintenance in the short-term, but its short-sighted nature makes it an ineffective long-term strategy.
- Preventive maintenance: Preventive maintenance strategy involves scheduled, forward-thinking maintenance based on key metrics and data points. An effective preventive maintenance strategy can ultimately increase asset life, maximize revenue and decrease equipment downtime.
- Condition-based maintenance: Condition-based maintenance aims to prevent failure through regular asset-check-ups and performance monitoring. In other words, equipment is constantly assessed and maintained, which requires significantly more coordination and manpower than other strategies.
- Predictive maintenance: Predictive maintenance, as the name suggests, aims to preemptively predict asset failures before they arise using data, sensors and IoT technology. Because it relies so intrinsically on data and technology, predictive maintenance comes with a higher up-front cost, and it is not yet feasible for many organizations.
What is the difference between a CMMS and an EAM system?
Both computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) and enterprise asset management (EAM) systems ultimately have the same purpose: to help organizations effectively manage their facilities and move from reactive to preventive maintenance strategies. That said, there are key differences between the tools. A CMMS, on one hand, works to streamline facilities management and asset maintenance during the operational part of an asset’s lifecycle. An EAM software, on the other hand, provides a broader range of capabilities that allow organizations to track, manage and analyze their asset performance throughout the entire asset lifecycle.
That said, many modern and robust CMMS solutions like Maintenance Connection have EAM functionalities – and the system can be upgraded or downgraded as needed over time.
What are the challenges that come with implementing a maintenance management software?
Many challenges come with implementing a maintenance management software and effectively anticipating and sidestepping these challenges is key to an effective long-term implementation. More specifically, you must consider challenges like:
- User adoption: Your team must know how to use the software and they must consistently incorporate it into their day-to-day
- Integrations: The maintenance management software you implement must integrate with your existing technological infrastructure – otherwise, you won’t get the comprehensive big-picture insights you need to maintain effective preventive maintenance strategies.
- Your budget: Look for hidden costs and make sure that you know how the CMMS will fit into your big-picture budget concerns.
- Vendor support: The right vendor will act as a partner, answering questions and helping with long-term training to maintain adoption and software efficacy over time.
Who can use a maintenance software?
In any maintenance operation, many team members can use a maintenance management software to replace legacy systems, increase efficiency, cut costs and reduce downtime. This includes:
- Maintenance managers: Maintenance managers can use a CMMS maintenance software to assign work orders, stay on top of preventive maintenance strategies, organize documentation and maintain regulatory compliance.
- Asset and facility technicians: Technicians can use a mobile-responsive, intuitive CMMS system to update work orders, check inventory, update asset condition information and access relevant asset documentation.
- C-suite executives and decision-makers: The data in a CMMS maintenance management software can be used to inform budgets, create actionable reports, stay up to date with maintenance activity and connect with other key departments and data sets.
- Plant managers: A maintenance manager can use a CMMS system to gain insight into big-picture maintenance metrics, to maximize productivity and to streamline audits.
- Inventory managers: MRO inventory is notoriously difficult to manage. A CMMS can simplify things by allowing inventory managers to get a transparent understanding of what inventory they have and where it is. They can also automate part orders and generate customizable reports on inventory usage, costs and other key metrics.
- Asset operators: Operators can relay up-to-the-minute asset information regarding work orders, asset status, breakdown status, cleaning schedules and more.
