How to Use CMMS Software in Your Manufacturing Plant

Manufacturers are increasingly feeling the pressure of inflated material and labor costs and less purchasing power of their dollar in today’s economy. This has led many business owners to seek out ways to reduce costs in traditionally expense-heavy but essential departments such as maintenance.

Fortunately, there is a wealth of software solutions on the market designed to give manufacturers the transparency and insights they need to reduce waste and cut costs.

“Using digital tools and advanced analytics capabilities alongside traditional lean techniques, [companies] aim to predict and prevent equipment failures, increase labor productivity, and streamline the management of external contractors.”
‍McKinsey

CMMS software is the most ubiquitous of this new breed of software options–a digital system that helps manufacturing companies unify their maintenance procedures and maximize efficiency.

Reducing Downtime and More: What Manufacturers Can Do with a CMMS

CMMS is an abbreviation for Computerized Maintenance Management System. It’s software that helps manufacturing plants centralize work processes across different departments and automates repetitive tasks like preventive maintenance.

All CMMS platforms offer a way to add procedures, checklists, work orders, forms, and other documentation. This helps your business deliver consistency and quality by helping maintenance teams stick to standardized procedures and processes.

Having a bunch of procedures and forms stored in an app doesn’t sound that impressive until you dig into what you can do with CMMS software. By centralizing factors such as:

• maintenance activities,
• maintenance schedules,
• asset management,
• inventory management,
• maintenance history, and
• work requests,

you can collate disparate, paper-based maintenance management into a single system. This allows for much better visibility of the health of your maintenance operations across the entire business.

This visibility can help you quickly identify patterns and trends that need to be addressed to reduce maintenance costs.

Data from your cloud-based CMMS system can be collated, analyzed, and broken down to reveal previously invisible patterns. Overproduction of products, slow-moving inventory, wasted time on unnecessary maintenance tasks, and repetitive equipment breakdowns have nowhere to hide when you are tracking all your assets, activities, and inventory with a CMMS.

Armed with this information, manufacturing leaders can make more informed decisions about areas of the business that need auditing.

Getting to the root cause of inefficiencies is vastly easier with maintenance data from your CMMS (and one of the key benefits of CMMS). Addressing these systemic issues leads to reduced downtime, reduced manufacturing waste, improved asset life cycles, and, crucially, reduced maintenance costs.

Using a CMMS as Your Preventive Maintenance Software

CMMS maintenance management software is specifically designed to manage cyclical tasks like predictive maintenance or planned maintenance activities. They help your business reduce costs associated with work order management by organizing workflows and giving visibility into the status of each asset.

As it allows you to handle every aspect of your company’s maintenance work in a single interface, a CMMS is a vast improvement in managing siloed Excel sheets or allocating tasks by email. You can see equipment uptime in real-time, manage work orders from start to finish, keep track of scheduled maintenance and emergency breakdown tasks, see your current stock of spare parts, and always know which technician is working on which asset.

This gives you a clear view of resource allocation–both human resources and inventory–and helps maintenance managers stay on top of their maintenance strategy.

How to Find the Best CMMS Software for Manufacturers

Getting a CMMS solution in place in your business is fast becoming crucial to achieving success benchmarks in today’s challenging economic environment.

Efficiency on production lines, the precise and uniform performance of both workers and machines, delivering products that meet quality protocols, and ensuring your business meets regulatory compliance measures are all things every modern enterprise has to manage.

However, choosing the best CMMS software solution can be overwhelming, with so many options on the market. Knowing what to look for when assessing your options can make it easier to break free of spreadsheets to set your organization up for the future.

CMMS Features to Look For:

• Does the system work equally well on a mobile device and a desktop?
• Are the platform and the mobile app easy to use for all skill levels?
• Can you set, allocate, and track KPIs for maintenance requests or min/max stock levels of spare parts?
• Is it easy for technicians to handle end-to-end work order management in the app?
• Does it have the right practical functionality, like notifications, chat functionality, and cross-platform compatibility?
• Will the software help you manage your entire maintenance program, with the ability to set preventive maintenance schedules, raise work orders, manage ongoing maintenance processes, look after assets, and so on?
• Is there a limit to how many pieces of equipment you can manage or work orders you can raise?
• Does the CMMS provide real-time data on asset performance via IoT integrations?
• Does the provider have case studies to back up their claims?
• Is the CMMS pricing flexible, and can user licenses be scaled up or down as needed?
• Is there a free trial available?

Ultimately, the best CMMS should be easy to use, offer robust reporting, be designed for collaboration, and provide both high-level and detailed views of assets, tasks, and resources.

MaintainX confidently meets these criteria for manufacturers, offering a user-friendly work order software that is rated #1 overall on G2.

MaintainX serves over 4,000 customers worldwide, from manufacturing to healthcare to facility management. Check us out by signing up for a free trial of our award-winning CMMS software.