These days, with supply-side challenges and labor shortages, finding the right CMMS tool with the right CMMS features should be the last thing on your mind. Or, maybe it should be the first.
This is what you need to know: Modern CMMS (computerized maintenance management system) can enhance company productivity through efficient use of resources, reduced costs, reduced defects, and reduced downtime.
Maintaining the Standard of Care across your operations that your employees and customers expect is more important than ever. Providing optimal standards of care for both employees and customers is crucial.
Whether you maintain one facility or 1,000, CMMS digital audit trails ensure compliance and provide alerts to maintenance operations when something goes wrong.
The Role of CMMS in Standard of Care
Socially distanced maintenance coordination via modern CMMS digitally assigns maintenance tasks and inspection checklists to frontline teams. Translation: No shared clipboards or paper! Team members can coordinate and communicate in real time from each employee’s personal device. Digital audit logs enable trust and compliance, all while empowering socially distanced management oversight.
Quality and efficiency always depend on strong maintenance activities. Nearly everything maintenance workers do affects compliance. Routine maintenance and inspecting equipment can mean the difference between engaged workers and those who want a way out. Likewise, top-notch standards of care and compliance keep customers returning.
CMMS is a fundamental tool to help adhere to regulatory compliance standards and reduce costs by centralizing processes. Real-time dashboard audits and inventories make inspections almost fun again. Modern CMMS with real-time insights provides an unprecedented level of centralized transparency across your operation and reduces the administrative load. A real-time reporting dashboard should provide a 360-degree overview of your operational performance, regulatory compliance, asset tracking, and managed inventory.
The Evolution of Maintenance Management
Let’s face it: right now, you need to ensure you are not going to run out of PPE and supplies. Create alerts for when PPE is running low. Track PPE cost and quantity being used by user, team, location, and sub-location. Maintenance managers emphasize standards and prioritize tasks to ensure health and safety compliance-related repairs and preventive maintenance are job #1.
Computerized maintenance management software is an effective tool. With automated reminders and schedules, maintenance teams can perform according to schedule based on standard operating procedures.
When we think about the word “connected,” it’s pretty simple. A modern CMMS connects workers via their mobile devices to all the necessary data and information, procedures, and equipment. CMMS also encourages collaboration and builds community.
Modern CMMS provides employees with the ability to interact and engage with their company and brand like never before. It’s no longer about one-way communication. CMMS can establish and increase a two-way dialogue with employees.”
CMMS and Modern Maintenance Management
Modern CMMS systems facilitate employee communication and strengthen engagement and loyalty, which in turn encourages collaboration and improves performance. High-performing employees are more likely to stay with a company and be more productive. Companies need to think about how they can connect their workers with work order management, the equipment, information, and processes they handle daily, like tracking work orders.
The best modern CMMS software connects workforces by communicating seamlessly between workers, managers, and owners. In fact, everyone involved in creating, executing, and processing work orders and work requests can access the CMMS in some way. And it translates into verified compliance, ongoing efficiency, higher standard of care, reliable preventive maintenance, inventory management, satisfied customers, and engaged workers.
By standard of care, we mean: managing your workers and teams, facilities and machines, and data and reports in such a way that you and your company take the care, produce the product, and manage the system at a high level. A standard of care that is high quality, high efficiency, and highly productive. Where all assets are working and producing at the highest possible level—what we call both figuratively and literally “a well-oiled machine.”
6 Standard-of-Care Steps to Implement Modern CMMS
1. Get to Know Your CMMS
Understand that CMMS is not the maintenance strategy itself, it is a tool to support the maintenance strategy and managed maintenance of an organization.
2. Communicate Change
Strong leaders take the time to understand workers’ experiences, providing time for workers to test out the CMMS on their own and through training opportunities that allow workers to master their new digital environments. Be the leader who is proactive rather than reactive (this goes for your maintenance plan as well!).
Lead well by communicating with employees about how what they do contributes to the company’s overall goals and strategy. Sean Williams says that “When employees understand the big picture and how they fit in, they feel valued, listened to, and feel like an important part of the team and organization.”
3. Update Your Maintenance Plan
Move your maintenance management plan from reactive to preventive maintenance by creating recurring scheduled maintenance work orders and standard operating procedures. If you’ve already done so, you’ve probably also begun to see increased efficiency and productivity.
4. Get Employee Buy-In
Understand that implementing a modern CMMS will only work across the company if there is maximum employee buy-in. Employee engagement is critical: involve the workforce in the CMMS implementation and integration process, respecting their input and engaging them cross-functionally. This is similar to how the employees who do the work should be involved in creating, writing, and testing Standard Operating Procedures. This will also make clear what it means to be a connected workforce, not simply by job function but by process.
5. Train Employees
Provide integrated CMMS training so that everyone knows how to use CMMS for optimal efficiency and productivity. Everyone who is going to use the CMMS in all its many ways needs to be skilled in its use. Even the best CMMS will fall flat if there are not enough skilled people to drive the process. Knowing this, it’s still important to note that the best modern CMMS makes implementation easy with excellent support and documentation.
6. Calculate Your KPIs
Convert the CMMS data–and there will be a lot of data at your fingertips–into useful and usable information. Use CMMS database functionality to analyze problems, identify solutions to improve performance, and produce key performance indicator reports to target goals and inefficiencies. This is the real muscle of modern CMMS. CMMS generates substantial data—from work order preventive maintenance and standard operating procedures schedules to supply chain inventories and compliance checklists. It’s exactly the information decision-makers need to make real-time decisions.
Get a CMMS to Implement Your Standard of Care
So what does it all mean? CMMS empowers a connected workforce to engage with a standard of care model that increases productivity, efficiency, and, in turn, a quality and standard of care for the customer.
Successful CMMS solution implementation translates into streamlined maintenance processes, greater reliability, higher quality production, improved consumer confidence, and ultimately sustained competitive advantage (Competition Forum, 2019). Consumer confidence is just one part of the “standard of care” promise. That is, consumer confidence is directly related to the care an employer takes of his employees. Valued employees work to keep valued customers.
Integrating a modern CMMS shows your employees and customers that you care. This standard of care, engaging your connected workforce in the company’s standard of care, translates into the following tangible, visible benefits:
- Increased equipment maintenance productivity
- Increased equipment life
- Simplified asset management
- Reduced maintenance costs
- Reduced equipment failure and downtime
- Increased labor efficiency
- Increased performance management
- Automated work orders and standard operating procedures
- Increased industry and regulatory compliance
- Enhanced organizational decision-making based on real data
- Real-time supply-chain management and inventory review
Modern CMMS allows facility management to create durable standards of care built on company values that support engaged workforces. This connected workforce then creates a deep standard of customer care.
MaintainX drives this standard of care in how it has built the best and most responsive modern CMMS on the market. Don’t settle for anything less.
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Caroline Eisner
Caroline Eisner is a writer and editor with experience across the profit and nonprofit sectors, government, education, and financial organizations. She has held leadership positions in K16 institutions and has led large-scale digital projects, interactive websites, and a business writing consultancy.
