The first of many steps toward streamlining your maintenance workflow is to purchase and integrate a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). That is, however, only the first of several processes. You must follow some CMMS best practices to reap the full range of benefits.
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Keep reading if you’re a maintenance director or facilities manager who has limited or no expertise with maintenance software. We’ll go over some essential CMMS best practices in this article to get you started.
What This Article Covers:
What Is CMMS?
CMMS is a form of scheduling and management software that makes it simple and effective for businesses to keep track of critical asset maintenance activities. You can schedule preventative maintenance to reduce repair costs and keep your assets in top shape.
When implemented correctly, a CMMS can drastically minimize downtime, increase maintenance team productivity and extend the life of your critical assets.
Before the advent of CMMS, getting centralized information and complete visibility were tedious tasks. Not to mention the impossibility of automating management processes. Maintenance information was buried in paper files and, later on, strewn across spreadsheets.
Now, CMMS use continues to grow exponentially with more and more companies adopting it.
The CMMS software market is projected to reach $1.72 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 8.41% from 2021 to 2028.
By streamlining workflows, implementing preventative maintenance best practices and ensuring assets are fully optimized, this type of software can dramatically transform your company’s maintenance department for the better.
CMMS Best Practices
Simply implementing a CMMS isn’t enough. There are some best practices to follow to make the most out of your CMMS investment.
Here’s a list of some CMMS best practices.
1. Involve the Entire Organization
After you’ve implemented the CMMS, the first thing you should do is get everyone in your organization on board. This applies to everyone, from entry-level technicians to maintenance managers and directors at the highest levels.
Everyone should truly understand and believe in the CMMS’s advantages. This is especially true at the executive level. You won’t get very far without top management support. You can do this by holding department-wide instructional seminars, including upper-level managers, and informing everyone about the CMMS’s potential benefits.
Pro Tip: Gather maintenance managers and create a program that illustrates the new system’s commitment. Motivate employees to utilize CMMS by showing how it can improve your overall business goals.
2. Integrate Mobile Capabilities
The main downside of using a paper-based maintenance program is the communication delay. Smooth communication between managers, supervisors, technicians and other employees seeking maintenance work is one of the main advantages of adopting a CMMS.
Your technicians already have a valuable tool in their pockets all day: their smartphones.
Using a mobile CMMS can save time spent driving between the job site and the office and provide staff with access to the system from anywhere. It can increase your efficiency. Whether it’s a means for field workers to log their time or track work without returning to a desktop or the documentation, you need to request tablets or smartphones for your team so you can leverage the benefits of mobile CMMS.
Pro Tip: Gather your team to brainstorm all the ways smartphones could help your company, from simpler user interfaces to scanning barcodes in the field. Share these samples with the vendor to see if there are any solutions you can use.
3. Establish Long-term Relationships With Vendors
A CMMS should include regular communication with the vendor, and many have dedicated teams to ensure that clients are getting the most out of their equipment.
Maintain open lines of communication so that you can stay informed about impending software updates, new features, webinars and other check-ins.
Pro Tip: Inquire about the vendor-client relationship, including phone and online support resources, communication channels, and problem-solving strategies. Ask about real-life scenarios that the seller has dealt with in the past.
4. Customize the System According to Your Needs
If the CMMS is challenging to use, it will be challenging to encourage your team to use it. Furthermore, there are many capabilities in the system that technicians conducting jobs in the field do not need to use, such as reporting or supplier management functionality.
According to UpKeep’s 2021 State of Maintenance Report, 66% of teams across various industries cite using CMMS platforms to manage maintenance activities, up from 42% in 2019.
More teams continue to adopt CMMS applications to meet their unique needs.
Finding a user-friendly system with configurable features, such as easily customizable windows or labels, can make the user feel more comfortable with understanding and using the system.
You want to make it as simple as possible for your staff to use this new system; otherwise, you risk adoption failure. If you’re confused about selecting the right system for your organization, then take a look at our CMMS requirements template.
Pro Tip: Set up different user types in your CMMS system with the help of your CMMS vendor. Setting up role-based user types guarantees that everyone sees what they need and nothing they don’t.
5. Create an Ongoing Training Program
Since your team must know how to open, manage and close requests, having training procedures and timetables in place will be critical. Software providers want you and your employees to get the most out of the system. Training is not only required for new users but also when upgrades become available.
Whether you’ve just purchased a new system or have been using one for a while, it’s critical to have a robust training program in place that gets new employees up to speed with the software and keeps existing employees up to date with modifications.
Regularly attending CMMS training classes allows users to learn new skills and encourages them to continue using their CMMS.
Pro Tip: Many CMMS providers will have training protocols in place already, so this is a good place to start. Utilize all training services they provide and assess if additional training is required.
6. Gain Insights From Reporting
Once you’ve had some time exploring and getting familiar with your CMMS, you should have started collecting data regarding assets, equipment performance and preventative maintenance actions. Use this data to gain valuable insights on more than simply maintenance schedules and asset health. Reporting capabilities can also help you budget and estimate future needs.
BI data and reporting are available in easy-to-read bar graphs, charts, PowerPoint templates and more in modern CMMS solutions. You can share these reports directly with management or administration and use them to make swift decisions that improve your procedures daily.
Pro Tip: Discuss your CMMS solution’s reporting and analytics capabilities with the vendor. They will set up these reports for you and advise you on how to reap their benefits. Some CMMS providers will even generate custom reports to help you achieve your specific business objectives.
7. Manage Compliance of Service Providers
Depending on the type of maintenance your company needs, you may have numerous contractors and service providers on site. This personnel is crucial to your operations, but they must adhere to your site’s standards and local or state regulations.
When a technician arrives on-site, a company relies on its supplier to have the appropriate insurance, necessary qualifications, licenses and other credentials. If not, a company leaves itself exposed to unforeseen operational and financial risks if something goes wrong.
You can integrate compliance management capabilities into a CMMS to indicate each contractor’s certifications and compliance and assist organizations in removing non-compliant staff to prevent operational, financial and legal problems.
Pro Tip: Import your contractor list into the compliance system or CMMS, and use the opportunity to update each worker’s certifications. You can collect records for repairs as employees conduct work, which will serve as an audit trail during compliance assessments.
8. Appoint CMMS Ambassadors
An organization should allocate at least two people to serve as a source of CMMS knowledge for all users after deploying a new maintenance system.
If the founding champion leaves without passing on technical knowledge, the CMMS may sit underused, resulting in a waste of money. It’s critical to have more than one individual who understands the CMMS.
These “CMMS ambassadors” can act as liaisons for others, answering questions and ensuring that users have the skills they need to get the most out of the system.
Pro Tip: Choose two or more software users to serve as system champions who are personable and enthusiastic about properly using the CMMS and alert all other users. Assign them to regular meetings where they can acquire information on new developments and best practices to share with the team as needed.
9. Standardize Data Entry Requirements
A CMMS is a database that contains information such as repair history, asset operating conditions and more. It’s tough to retrieve useful data if people aren’t on the same page regarding how to enter data.
According to Statista, lack of employees’ analytical skills was the top data challenge in 2021 for 41% of respondents.
Apart from the immediate income impact, poor data quality increases the complexity of data ecosystems and leads to poor decision-making in the long run.
CMMS companies are aware of this and have expertise in establishing a maintenance data standards.
Pro Tip: Work with your vendor to create or identify a standard that fits the system’s structure and is simple enough for all users to understand. Hold a first training session to explain the standard’s logic. Continue to hold training sessions until all users have a basic understanding of and ability to recognize codes.
10. Empower CMMS Ambassadors
Give the CMMS ambassadors access to new features or procedures so they may try them out for the rest of the team.
When power users demonstrate to the rest of the team that a new feature can make their tasks easier or increase productivity significantly, they are more inclined to use it.
Pro Tip: Share any time-saving or risk-avoidance success stories with the rest of your team to recognize their efforts. You can motivate employees by organizing competitions for money saved or documenting it within your CMMS to encourage camaraderie and further adoption.
Mistakes To Avoid
Every good software system has the potential to bring difficulties if not implemented or handled properly. Consider this your crystal ball if you’ve ever finished a project and thought to yourself, “Well, if I had to do it over again, I’d do a few things differently.”
Here are some of the most typical issues that other companies wish they could have avoided while deploying a CMMS.
1. Lack of Staff Awareness
Employees are unlikely to embrace new software without being included, updated or informed about the change and how it will benefit them. If people who must utilize it are not well connected to the “why,” your organization will never fully achieve its potential.
How to avoid lack of staff awareness:
- When the project begins, communicate your goals for the new software and remind yourself of them frequently.
- Share the training resources provided by your vendors with your staff and encourage them to use them regularly.
- Send weekly reports via email or other channels on using the program and how it affects operations.
- Commit to go-live dates and communicate effectively. During large-scale changes, knowing what to expect and trusting the process will help keep everyone on board.
2. Lack of Leadership Involvement
When used consistently and accurately, a CMMS system can be extremely beneficial. However, without buy-in and involvement from every department and level of management, implementation will not be deeply embedded in your entire team’s day-to-day work.
How to avoid lack of leadership involvement:
- Determine which stakeholders are critical to the successful implementation of your new CMMS.
- Determine each stakeholder’s needs, pay attention to them and show how the new or upgraded CMMS will benefit their areas of oversight.
- Define how you’ll interact with each stakeholder and make sure you keep them up to date.
3. Lack of Understanding of Project Scope
Without a clear scope, it’s easy to get off track with a CMMS implementation. It’s easy to squander time on areas, teams or procedures that aren’t related to your CMMS implementation.
How to avoid lack of understanding of project scope:
- Consider a phased approach if you want to employ the entire suite of services. For example, asset tracking in phase one, preventative maintenance programs in phase two, and work order management and purchase orders in phase three. A well-defined scope for each phase will keep the project moving.
- Consider how the timing of your implementation will affect your results. Keeping your team focused on the CMMS installation will be easier if you avoid other projects or the busy season.
- To keep the project on track, all project leaders must have a thorough awareness of the scope, phases and deadlines.
4. Failure To Foresee Problems
You lose the opportunity to design solutions that can prevent or rapidly address obstacles if you don’t take the time to anticipate problems that can send your project off track.
How to avoid failure to foresee problems:
- Prior to deploying a CMMS, make a list of all potential issues. Make a list with your team after brainstorming.
- By avoiding conflicts with other projects, your team will be able to focus fully on the change and make the most of it.
- Deal with difficulties head-on. It’s human nature to avoid bringing up problems or provoking confrontation, but the only way to avoid them is to recognize them.
- Document and discuss the most serious problems to discover solutions.
- Determine whether the situation is something the team wants to accept, avert or alleviate, and make plans appropriately.
- Establish open channels of communication to allow for the resolution of new difficulties as they occur.
5. Inadequate Leadership for Implementation
A single person or group of people can lead the change to install a new CMMS successfully.
These project leaders oversee your CMMS installation and all of the duties listed above, ensuring that best practices are followed and typical blunders are avoided.
How to avoid inadequate leadership for implementation:
- Define a steering committee or a single person who will be in charge of the project’s communication, training and execution.
- Ascertain that all impacted employees are aware of who is in charge of the implementation.
- Specific positions, such as project manager, trainer, team champion and others, should be clearly defined. This will assist all employees in understanding their resources as they begin to use their new system.
Conclusion
CMMS software can help you create highly productive maintenance procedures, but getting there takes time, effort and constant monitoring. You’re one step closer to maintenance management success if you follow these CMMS best practices.
What are the CMMS best practices you follow in your organization? Let us know in the comments!
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