As organizations continue to look at ways to make the workplace safer, standard processes and procedures are consistently reviewed and audited to ensure the safety of employees and customers.
These standards are never more important than when large-scale safety events, such as COVID-19, leave a global footprint on how companies do business. With the World Health Organization (WHO) still discovering key data points about the latest strain of Coronavirus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has outlined a list of recommended strategies that employers can leverage to prevent the unintentional spread of the virus.
No part of an organization is left untouched by these concerns, with asset maintenance professionals perhaps having the highest possibility of being impacted due to the collaborative nature of their daily duties.
One way to ensure the safety of workers is to utilize your asset management software to heed the suggestions of the WHO to maximize social distancing and encourage the overall safety of your workforce.
The following 5 strategies and corresponding features of your modern asset management software (CMMS or EAM) provide a handful of strategies & best practices that you and your asset management team can leverage to help offset risk during events like COVID-19:
1. Preventive maintenance procedures promote routine/extended environmental cleaning.
By leveraging preventive maintenance procedures that generate automatically on a set schedule, you can ensure that standard cleaning is being completed on time and thoroughly while eliminating any potential health risks.
Standard procedures, and the corresponding work orders that are generated, will also provide the ability to append the tasks that need to be completed. This provides the ability to accurately adopt a set of standards to match the expanding considerations that employers are taking to ensure proper separation between employees as well as the tools and materials being used are properly sanitized before the next use.
2. Event-based notifications assist with employee separation.
Organizations can look to leverage their asset management software to automatically generate notifications. This allows employees to keep up-to-date with the most current information (work order update, inventory outage, asset downtime, etc.) without coming into contact with other employees.
Whether being notified that a key piece of inventory is out of stock or that a work order is on extended hold due to safety concerns, using event-based automatic notifications to aid in internal communication is a quick and efficient way to ensure updates are provided in real-time, while also minimizing the risk that can be associated with health concerns such as COVID-19.
3. Mobility facilitates remote work.
Companies may run into situations that require employees to be isolated as a precaution due to COVID-19 considerations. Leveraging your asset management software’s mobile capabilities can help keep work moving while nearly eliminating the possibility of spreading any potential infection.
By strategically using a mobile asset management solution, companies can essentially have the entire lifecycle of a work order done by multiple employees without anyone ever coming into contact thanks to key features like real-time updates, history logging and documentation access.
Even a mobile-based service request management tool can provide additional layers of safety by enabling employees within the organization that are not asset maintenance professionals to submit requests for help. And they can do so without ever having to encounter anyone, further aiding in efforts to keep employees healthy.
4. Access to key documentation reduces risk.
Being able to access critical documentation, whether it be a specific engineering document or a photo of a part, is key when looking at additional ways to encourage intentional social separation.
By enabling team members to access key documentation from wherever they are, the work can continue completing work while reducing the need to meet co-workers to gain specific asset-based knowledge.
5. Shift management tools minimize in-person interaction.
In addition to the tools mentioned above, using your asset management’s shift management tool can further aid in a company’s efforts to minimize in-person interactions.
By implementing a staggered shift approach and using a combination of automatic notifications and mobile access, teams can continue to ensure both standard and critical asset maintenance is completed. And do so unhindered by roadblocks that could be caused due to health concerns stemming from COVID-19 and other health events.
Although there is always a level of uncertainty that is present with events such as the COVID-19 outbreak, one thing is certain: organizations that leverage asset management technology to aid in the efforts to keep maintenance management professionals safe during situations like this are more capable of staying ahead of the curve, enabling continued efficiencies while avoiding downtime that could be impacted due to staff health and quarantine protocols.
With Accruent’s asset management software, Maintenance Connection, organizations have access to the tools mentioned above in addition to a larger package that is purpose-built for flexibility, mobility and scalability.
Contact us today to start a conversation about how Accruent’s Maintenance Connection can help you with your asset management needs.
