When rolling out CMMS, make sure everyone gets involved

Enterprise-level CMMS promotes superior maintenance operations across the organization by sharing PMs and other best practices.

Paul Lachance, Smartware Group Inc.

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When I first started my CMMS career, the only way enterprises could share asset maintenance information across facilities, plants and factories was by building out a proprietary wide area network. This was costly, not always reliable and a drag on performance. Then came the Internet – the game-changer for easily sharing information across multiple locations.

Today, enterprise CMMS makes it possible to turn multi-site maintenance operations into one happy family by:

- Seamlessly managing maintenance and repair operations from site to site
- Easily seeing what is going on in requisite facilities, i.e., ratio of preventive maintenance (PM) schedules to ad hoc service requests; labor and materials costs; etc. This can be done at the site, region and global level
- Sharing best practices with sister facility counterparts on PMs, work flow, etc.
- Allocating critical spare parts to sister facilities (“just in time” inventory)
- Easily integrating new facilities under construction into the enterprise CMMS maintenance management structure.

Before installing an enterprise CMMS solution it’s a good idea to understand both the physical and organizational structure of the enterprise. Will the enterprise CMMS allow for good corporate planning, but with easy customization for site-specific needs? Will there be strict global maintenance management guidelines or will control remain at the regional or site level?

Will the maintenance team, including repair technicians have access to the CMMS system? Will designated employees be submitting trouble tickets for repairs? What about specialized repairs that require support from machine vendors?

Key components of an enterprise solution should include:

- Languages/localization
- Permissions model for access to and sharing asset information
- Global and site-specific control
- Analysis and reporting on individual equipment, regardless of location
- Rolling out a new “site”
- JIT Inventory
- Integration with the IT department’s Active Directory and other computer management systems to keep the peace with IT.

Other benefits of deploying CMMS across an enterprise include analyzing maintenance cost differences between sites. CMMS can help identify where and why certain plants are showing higher maintenance-related expenses due to fewer PMs, aging assets, staff shortages, etc.

Enterprise-level CMMS promotes superior maintenance operations across the organization by sharing PMs and other best practices, and comparing asset effectiveness.

If a facility is underperforming from a maintenance perspective, enterprise CMMS can help alert and explain why.

CMMS has long made sense for individual facilities to improve maintenance and related operations with greater asset longevity, improved labor and materials costs, and a smoother running operations team. But don’t leave out the rest of the other facility family members.