A maintenance management system is one of the critical decisions a business makes, yet is also the most carelessly implemented process. Taking care of whether the lighting or HVAC systems are working properly is equally important compared to ensuring your business achieves its production targets.
A business cannot escape from dedicating its quality time to facility operations unless it is prepared to land in a poor work environment, reduced productivity, dissatisfied clients, and financial losses. Even though the assistance of an asset maintenance firm works, using a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) can be a smart move.
Why Is a Maintenance Management System an Effective Way?
Would you be surprised to know, as per research, that the cost of downtime per hour in a retail industry is around USD 1.1 million? Businesses often overlook the small maintenance tasks and petty expenses that can lead to significant loss of their investment. A damaged asset is an Achilles' heel that can lead to inefficiency, hampering business operations and causing significant loss of time and money.
How does a maintenance system work?
As per a Facility Maintenance report of 2019, aging equipment is found to be the cause in case of 40% of asset downtime, whereas mechanical failure is in 24% of the cases. In a commercial space, assets run their course of time, wear out, and ultimately break down.
If not maintained properly they will deteriorate even faster and drain down the investment without achieving the purpose. The maintenance system makes sure the assets are maintained properly, thus extending their life, reducing downtime, and eliminating unexpected breakdowns.
Maintenance system vs. computerized maintenance management system
In contrast to maintaining assets manually, risking unexpected breakdowns, the maintenance system provides businesses with the assistance of facility operations service firms dealing with the complexities.
However, making your way through bundles of files, crunching numbers, and ensuring seamless communications and asset functionality is easier with computers and technology. This is where the CMMS comes to the rescue of businesses and the facilities operations firms. The CMMS can also be used instead of a maintenance system.
Asset maintenance strategy to suit your needs
Approaching building asset management challenges without a planned strategy or any data-dependent decision can be a disaster awaiting. Businesses may have different approaches to handling building assets, but choosing the strategy that suits or works for them is critical.
Here are some of the strategies that can save your investments in assets and operations.
a. Reactive maintenance Are you the one who wouldn't prefer to invest time and money in managing your business assets and choose to think only when they break down? This run-to-failure or reactive maintenance approach is advised only in cases where issues arise unpredictably, such as turning on faucets and lights when no one is using them.
In the rest of the instances, such as boiler issues and electrical shocks, things could turn dangerous and costly if not attended on time.
b. Predictive maintenance You need to take certain building issues seriously before things get out of control. The predictive maintenance system enables you to take measures to fix things in their earlier stage, which is called preventive maintenance. Manual inspections can be of help in detecting issues, but they are not error-free.
The maintenance management system uses technology to aid in constant monitoring and timely problem detection and sends real-time alerts to get the issues resolved. As it demands excessive dependency on data, it can be a costly investment.
c. Preventive maintenance You will never want to spend everyday monitoring things that wouldn't break down anytime they're installed. Preventive maintenance enables you to conduct inspections at prescheduled intervals of time or extent of asset usage. This eliminates your burden of routine tasks and lets you only conduct inspections and maintenance tasks at scheduled intermission time.
So equipment that is showing reduced performance during time or approaching warranty expiry can be managed better.
d. Reliability-centered maintenance Another approach to this is to tap into your innovative side and analyze every piece of equipment for possibilities of failures and chart out a reliability-centered maintenance plan specific to each of them.
This approach can be quite complex, demanding a more critical approach, but can be very effective against assets that have higher possibilities of failure and dangerous consequences.
Benefits of a maintenance management system
Getting a resource management system to monitor your building performance may seem a costly investment, as it includes the expenses of the use of technology, software, and specialized efforts.
However, the benefits it delivers such as reducing power consumption, asset breakdown and downtime, and overheads, and increasing asset life and performance can overshadow the expenses incurred during the installation. Here are some of the benefits maintenance management brings to your business.
a. Bringing efficiency to issue detection Investing in a maintenance management system rather than spending efforts on the manual is a smart move. It is because you'll be making a robust system to monitor, detect, and alert issues related to assets on time. This not only reduces manual efforts but also helps you make data-dependent assessments accurate.
b. Increasing equipment performance and life Monitoring the performance of assets using a maintenance management system ensures your assets are on the radar round the clock, any malfunction is immediately fixed and the asset is serviced on time. This increases the life span of your assets, thus preventing unexpected breakdowns and damage due to negligent use.
c. Get real-time alerts on real issues Every issue with an asset in a commercial property needs immediate identification and resolution.
A maintenance management system makes sure the issues you rely on are detected and notified in real time, thus keeping you in better control over building performance.
d. Automated work order management and quick issue resolutions Managing business operations always meant sitting on a pile of work orders and waiting for permission to get issues resolved.
Come to the new world, where a work order management tool automatically creates a work order the moment an issue arises. You are just left with the task of raising a ticket with a vendor to troubleshoot the issue online.
e. Ways towards regulation compliance and sustainability With governments becoming aware of climate change, compliance with environmental conservation measures is the latest challenge for modern businesses.
Investing in environmental conservation may seem like an unwanted burden for them when surviving the competition is the card they're staring at. A maintenance management system eases this burden and helps businesses maintain regulation compliance in their system and stay sustainable for the future.
f. Saving more on your investment For most businesses, spending on material management may seem like draining money on luxuries. Most of the time, temporary fixes can aggravate the situation and force the business to invest in replacing the entire setup things, which can be costlier. Carefully planning your maintenance management strategy by assessing your building requirements can put you on track for savings.
A maintenance management system is a smart building investment choice for businesses planning to make their buildings efficient and sustainable.
It delivers effective strategies for the preventive, predictive, and reactive maintenance of assets. Get in touch with a facility operations expert regarding your building requirements to make a better choice of the CMMS that works for your business.
