CMMS in the enterprise

How can your CMMS cross departmental boundaries and assist the entire organization in improving 
production volume and quality?

Over the past dozen years, purposes of the CMMS strictly within the maintenance department have become well understood. From outside the maintenance department, it still often looks like a mysterious black hole. Others outside asset care do not understand how the CMMS helps them. They still ask why the equipment must go down so often for predictive and preventive maintenance, why repairs take so long, why they don't have more advance notice of equipment repairs, why technicians don't know how long the repair will take, why the problems they have noted have not been remedied---why, why, why?

How to rectify this
In a production or industrial environment, or for that matter, in practically any environment, the first signs of equipment problems or degradation are generally noted by operators of the equipment. The relationship between these operators and the maintenance department is quite often at least mildly antagonistic and is generally, at best, one of indifference. This is counterproductive as the relationship offers perhaps the best opportunity to improve the production process. It also ensures more uptime and generally elevates both production volume and quality.

As with most relationships, this one can be improved with better, more specific, and more timely communication. Many production environments rely on a machine log, created by the operator, to relay information to management and to the maintenance department. This process often results in cryptic and incomplete information or information that is not well-understood by the recipient. The information reaches the maintenance technician in just such a state and this too often results in a lack of understanding or at least a lack of a sense of urgency. Thus the note or report goes on the big stack at the side of the desk---and stays there far too long. It is here that the CMMS can come into play.

A CMMS provides an automated method--through service or work requests--to provide this information in an orderly fashion and in a format that allows the operator to be more specific as to areas of the equipment, symptoms, self-diagnosis performed and other potentially valuable information.

The service request can be configured and tailored to an easy-to-use format that meets the needs of both the operator and the maintenance technician. Additionally the CMMS can be configured to provide a structured mechanism for the operator to view recent maintenance activity. This leads to better self-diagnosis and thus to a more clearly articulated transfer of information about symptoms.

Communicate electronically
Traditionally one drawback to implementation of a process as described above has been that the implementation team typically installs the CMMS only on maintenance computers or maintenance local area network client machines. More progressive CMMS systems now support access to required functionality through e-mail, Internet, intranet, browsers, fax, and even pagers where appropriate. More immediate communications generate more immediate action and results. Also keep in mind that the electronic presence of operator communications in the CMMS are much more difficult to place to the side and forget.

To better convey this idea, consider the following example. A maintenance organization has a central dispatch unit that takes equipment problem calls. It has a CMMS loaded on every computer at the central maintenance facility. The plant is widespread, thus the maintenance staff meets Monday mornings at the central facility to receive preventive or predictive work orders and other work scheduled for the week. After the meeting, the staff disperses throughout the plant for the remainder of the week and returns on Friday afternoon to report work accomplished for the week.

The maintenance crew handles emergency equipment problems by pager and telephone conversations during the week. This makes the communication of detail difficult.

An alternative approach through a CMMS is for the dispatcher to create the emergency work order, page the technician, and leave the work order on the pager or for the dispatcher to e-mail the work order to the technician. The technician can access any terminal with a browser and pull the work order. The work order is complete with details and attachments such as drawings, material safety data sheets, or other needed information. This is a much more accurate and timely approach to the problem.

Decisions making--at the lowest possible level
One of the associated problems resulting from the use of a machine log or other similar reporting mechanism is that information is generally filtered through a number of people before reaching the maintenance technician. Invariably this results in interpretations and often results in decisions being made and priorities set by people who are too distant from, and unfamiliar with, both symptoms and cures for the problem.

Again the CMMS assists by providing an easy means for the operator and technician to co  mmunicate directly. Not only can the operator check previous activities and enter symptoms and other data directly, but the technician can respond directly thus keeping the operator abreast of plans, schedules, and progress. This interactive correspondence often creates more of a dialogue and provides a better description of the symptoms and isolation of the problem.

Financial management involvement
A major advantage of a CMMS is its data collection, reporting, analysis, and correlation capabilities. The system can collect data regarding symptoms, failures, and repairs for individual equipment items and this in itself has value. However this value is greatly enhanced if management looks beyond the single equipment item and to similar types, models, and classes of equipment. The CMMS provides the capabilities to compare failure and repair data for a single equipment item to different equipment that serves the same purpose. These comparison capabilities are valuable when determining which piece of equipment to retire, which equipment item to dispose of, and how long equipment should be retained.

It is not unusual for these analyses to reveal that the cost of ownership of a specific equipment model is not strongly related to the cost of acquisition of that equipment. The CMMS tracks and reports on other areas requiring financial decisions. These may show increased staffing for more frequent preventive maintenance has a payback in terms of production savings and efficiencies. Also, failure analyses
quickly uncover frequent failures that could be prevented with more timely preventive maintenance.

Enterprise data and CMMS
If your CMMS provides the capability generally referred to as attachments, you can associate data from other programs with equipment, parts, work orders, and other modules within the CMMS. These data, when combined with symptom, failure, and repair data uncovers unexpected problems that contribute to equipment failure and production down-time.

An example is the availability within the CMMS of a CAD drawing attachment detailing plant construction including such things as air conditioning, ventilation, electrical, and piping systems. Often with identical equipment items, one may be failing more often than similar systems because of the lack of proximity to adequate ventilation or similar environmental conditions.

Another example is the placement of equipment within a plant as revealed by a CAD or other graphical drawing and an equipment specifications diagram. In this situation, a particular equipment item may generate a high level of heat and the equipment may be placed particularly close to heat-sensitive equipment. Again, a CMMS generated incidence-of-failure report superimposed on other documents pinpoints the problem quickly.

Create synergy--build a cohesive team environment
Most people-to-people and department-to-department relationships and cooperation problems within an organization can be traced to communication failures. Faulty, slow, inadequate, or inefficient communications add to the problems and people develop attitudes due to these failures.

People want to do a good job but are hampered by lack of good information or by such a volume of information that they cannot extract the important data. The staff in one department provides information to and receives information from staff members in other departments. If that information is not targeted, accurate, and timely, then resentment and resignation develop and the situation continues to degrade.

Many cures exist for this problem. One of the more powerful cures is better adaptation and implementation of the CMMS to foster improved communication so critical to plant success. Use the inherent capabilities of the CMMS' Internet / intranet / browser / e-mail / fax / pager support to make information available everywhere it is needed. Also, you can use the same tools to ensure that data is shared and decisions are made at the lowest possible level within the organization.

Make equipment incidence of failure, mean-time-between-failure, preventive maintenance schedules and other reports available for whoever can benefit from this data. Finally, use the excellent filtering and selection functionality in a good CMMS to allow these people to gain access to exactly the information they require quickly and easily--no more and no less. Make it easy for inter-departmental communication to exist in a timely electronic fashion and directly without filtering, analysis, and review.

Summary
Finally, what levels of functionality, assistance, skills, and knowledge should you expect from your CMMS supplier to help you better implement the systems across your enterprise? This question falls into several areas.

The first of these is the area of functionality. The CMMS must provide the capability to classify equipment so you can make cross-comparisons. The system must also provide the capability to capture the correct information, that is, symptoms, failure codes, and associated repairs. Concurrent with this data capture, the system must provide powerful but easy-to-use navigation features to allow users to access the data quickly to diagnose the problem. Users should be able to view recent equipment repairs and predictive maintenance information and even look across similar equipment groups if needed to find comparable problems and repairs.

This must be supplemented with inventory control, tools control, rescheduling, and other modules to ensure that the needed tool, part, technician, trade, skill level, contractor or other vital component is available when required. The system should provide some combination of parent / child / component system so that users can do all possible work on equipment that is dependent upon other system elements for any reason when the production cycle is disrupted.

These dependencies may be a function of a common production line, a common power source, or any of many other commonalities They can cause multiple equipment items to go off-line if work on one equipment item is required. When this happens you must be able to view upcoming work easily for all dependent equipment and thus prevent unnecessary take-downs.

Navigation tools must allow you to move through the CMMS quickly and go directly to your destination and return to the starting point with one or two clicks as opposed to a long journey up, down and across menu structures. Reports and on-screen queries must be structured to allow technicians to find critical data quickly.

No organization is likely to load the client portion of a CMMS on every computer in the organization. The organization, however, is likely to provide other tools on each computer--that is, browser access to the company website, Internet / intranet access, e-mail, and pagers. Thus the CMMS must support access to critical functionality such as service requests, reporting, expedited dispatch of emergency work orders, and others from non-CMMS computers.

Background knowledge, skills, and service ethic is also important. Your CMMS vendor should provide implementation and support staff that is heavily experienced in the needs of maintenance, operations, and production. This same staff must also possess strong computer skills and knowledge of their product. With those prerequisites must be implementation and support staff that cares about helping their customer.

Lastly, the vendor staff must possess the skills to help you convince your management to make the full commitment to involve everyone in the organization that is connected with production volume and quality.