Pat Gehl, J. B. Systems, Woodland Hills, Calif.

For years obtaining details of the real cost of operating a maintenance department was at best a rough estimate. It was difficult to account for each craft's time, the materials used, the turnovers, and cost of inventory, the cost of line change outages, the cost of shutdowns and turnarounds, and so on. Many organizations required that maintenance cost be charged back to the department receiving the work. The lack of detailed, factual data resulted in lost revenue opportunities for the maintenance department. Capital projects often experienced overruns from the lack of timely financials.

During the last two or three years, more companies are enjoying a completely new experience. These experiences are the result of the second generation of computerized maintenance management systems. These new client/server packages operate under a Windows environment. The client is a PC operating the Windows application package while the server is a fast, large-capacity database computer. There are two characteristics of these packages that makes them better candidates to pass accurate financial data to the corporate enterprise systems. First, Windows enables the user to extract information for use with the proliferation of other Windows-based packages found in the financial department. Secondly, and most important, is the fact that the computerized maintenance management system server most often supports the more popular database managers, that is, Oracle, Informix, Sybase, SQL/Server and SQL. This means there is the opportunity to purchase a computerized maintenance management system package that operates with the same database manager chosen by the information services department as the company standard. This common method for handling information makes it rather straightforward for the computerized maintenance management system to make cost information available to the enterprise system. This ease of information exchange caused a rush in the computerized maintenance management system industry to integrate their packages with the commercially available financial packages. The desire to provide a seamless integration between computerized maintenance management system and financial packages is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that several computerized maintenance management system suppliers paid as much a twelve thousand dollars for the opportunity to work with Oracle Corporation to integrate with their financial package. Other examples are computerized maintenance management system integrations with the SAP financials and Computer Associates' PRMS package.

The depth of the integration depends on the companies involved and the customer needs. A general overview of the typical integration is depicted in Figure 1.

The following are the principal functions of a computerized maintenance management system and financial package generic integration:

• to provide the computerized maintenance management system with non-stock material and services usage;
• to provide the computerized maintenance management system with material issued and return transactions
• to provide visibility through the use of lookup screens within the computerized maintenance management system to the financial inventory and purchasing information;
• to provide validations of stock numbers and suppliers used in the computerized maintenance management system against the financial inventory tables;
• to pass purchase requisitions from the computerized maintenance management system for non-stock materials and services to the financial purchasing module;
• to pass labor information to the general ledger; and
• to pass material requirements to the financial inventory.

Additional integration efforts resulted in having the computerized maintenance management system generate on demand project work orders to manage capital projects. The demand work orders create sub-work orders for each task in the project. These are used to produce Gantt charts (see Figure 2) and track the associated cost. The project costs are passed from the computerized maintenance management system to the general ledger of the financial package thus making the budget monitoring much more timely.

On-line assignment of crafts to work orders from screens such as the one shown in Figure 3 enable the computerized maintenance management system to track labor hours accurately. This information is made available to the enterprise accounting software seamlessly for display, review, and cost calculations.

Two final examples of cost data from computerized maintenance management system being used for integration with a company's business system are tracking ongoing asset cost versus replacement cost--see Figure 4-- and maintenance cost as it relates to product production. The modern computerized maintenance management system tracks events as they occur for each product produced. This event information normally is picked up in real time from programmable logic controllers and used to associate maintenance cost with the products being produced. One such information screen is shown in Figure 5.

Armed with this information from the computerized maintenance management system, the marketing department can apply maintenance's share of production cost more accurately when pricing the product. Traditionally the cost of maintenance has been evenly spread across all products which, of course, is not accurate.

In summary, the bottom line for the modern computerized maintenance management system is that it can play a significant role in providing valuable cost information when properly integrated with the enterprise financial system.