Getting ahead of the competition in any way can help boost your business margins and help your company become more profitable. Increasing your productivity is one of the smarter ways to achieve this. Improving it can take many forms, from streamlining operations to more efficient work practices.
Perhaps the single smartest way to boost your productivity is with a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), which can help you manage and optimize maintenance operations. This can help specifically with productivity by reducing downtime and extending asset lifespan. In this article, we’ll look into the key features of CMMS, how they can be implemented, and how you can make the most of the system to boost your productivity.
What Can CMMS Do?
What can’t it do? CMMS is one of those things that you might think you’ll be able to do without, but the moment you use it for the first time, you’ll realize how much you’ve been missing out. Focusing specifically on increasing productivity, there are four main useful features of CMMS.
Work Order Management
Let’s start with perhaps the most helpful feature on offer: work order management. This streamlines the creation, assignment, and tracking of work orders, making it easier for maintenance teams to prioritize tasks and allocate resources efficiently. By streamlining these tasks, CMMS helps minimize your company’s downtime and keeps operations running smoothly.
Beyond that, work order management can help improve communications between maintenance teams and other departments, which can help ensure there aren’t any costly miscommunications and that any problems that do arise can be more efficiently resolved.
Preventative Maintenance Scheduling
Every business manager knows how inefficient downtime is. It’s the bane of every micro manager’s existence, and it often feels as unavoidable as the passing of time. However, with a little help from CMMS, you can dodge as many of these inefficiencies as possible. By allowing for proactive maintenance planning, the system enables you to anticipate and address potential issues before they escalate into costly breakdowns.
Furthermore, by helping companies prioritize maintenance tasks based on criticality and risk, CMMS ensures that any downtime is on less-high-priority tasks. This ensures that downtime is kept at a minimum and any disruptions won’t hinder the most critical operations of your business.
Inventory Management
We’ve covered some of the ways how CMMS can help streamline operations, but there are more ways that it can help perk up your productivity. For example, by tracking spare parts and consumables, the system can help ensure there won’t be any annoying stockouts, ensuring customers are never hit with that annoying ‘out of stock’ warning.
Similarly, CMMS stops you from overstocking, thereby ensuring that you don’t have any higher expenses than you need to have and that you’re always operating at peak efficiency.
Mobile Accessibility
Mobile access to CMMS can be a game-changer for productivity. It lets technicians pull up info and tick off work orders without being tied to a desk. This means they can get things done faster and on the move, cutting down on wasted time.
It also means less paperwork and more communication between teams, as everyone’s updates are instant and digital. No more chasing down paper trails or asking around the office for confirmation.
How to Use CMMS for Productivity Gains
While there are more ways than just these four CMMS can help increase your company’s productivity, we’ve only included four, or else we’d be rambling on for a while. Let’s talk about how you can implement the system.
The first thing you need to do is to lay out what you’re aiming for with CMMS. This means figuring out where you’re hitting snags right now. For example, if downtime is eating into your day or if you’re not getting the most out of your team. Once you’ve got a goal, you can set some clear targets to hit it. Don’t forget these goals need to gel with the bigger picture of where you want your business to go. Irrelevant goals and KPIs will not only waste resources but also misguide your team, leading to the opposite of what you want: inefficiency.
Next up, you’ve got to get your current maintenance records into the CMMS and make sure they play nice with any other systems you’ve got running, like your ERP software. This bit’s crucial because you want to make sure all your data is on point and consistent so you’re not working off bad or outdated data. Systems like CMMS by Llumin are designed with this in mind, ensuring a smooth data flow and making integration a breeze.
Last but not least, get everyone up to speed on how to use the new system. This means not just a one-off training session but really making sure everyone is comfortable and on board with the new way of doing things. If anyone is out of step, it can lead to a world of chaos, so be responsive to feedback and ready to tweak things as you go to make the transition smoother.
Case Studies of CMMS Increasing Productivity
You don’t need to take our word for it. CMMS has helped thousands of companies internationally trim their operations and streamline them for success.
For instance, Oceania Dairy, a key player in the global dairy market, faced significant challenges, including the risk of dust explosions in their powdered milk production and maintenance schedule management. By using Llumin’s CMMS+, they were able to enhance their safety protocols. The system’s efficiency in tracking and scheduling maintenance work improved speed to completion by up to 35%!
Similar case studies can be found from Llumin with Sunny Delights Beverages Co, Granite Falls, and TenCate, all of whom were able to use CMMS to streamline their practices and become more productive.
Conclusion
It’s pretty obvious that CMMS is not just a nice-to-have but a must-have in today’s competitive markets. We’ve seen its success with big businesses and small ones, and nowadays, the only companies without them are those who are missing out on major time and money savings. Whether it’s minimizing downtime, streamlining inventory, or making maintenance tasks easier, CMMS is one of the best ways to boost productivity and operational efficiency. So, if you’re looking for that special something to stand out from the crowd, this might just be what you’re looking for.