Why CMMS Remains Critical to Manufacturing Maintenance

aintenance, repair and operations (MRO) teams play a crucial role in ensuring a  manufacturing organization’s success. In today’s environment, staying competitive means  maintaining a tight production schedule, minimizing downtime and ensuring that plants  run at peak performance. This creates obvious challenges, especially for maintenance  teams operating with a limited budget and a shrinking workforce.

Given this, how can MRO teams deliver greater reliability? The answer to this question for  many manufacturers is with the help of a computerized maintenance management system  (CMMS) via its ability to enable data-driven maintenance, automate safety practices and  integrate with other systems commonly used by manufacturers.

Data-driven maintenance

Like predictive maintenance, data-driven maintenance strategies can dramatically extend  asset lifespans, reduce downtime and lower overall maintenance costs. However, many  organizations haven’t implemented such strategies because they lack an experienced labor  force or a heavy investment in technologies designed to overcome that knowledge gap.

Sifting through piles of condition monitoring data is a labor-intensive process that requires  time and experience. Likewise, accurately analyzing that data, contextualizing it and  deciding exactly how to respond to changes in asset performance all require expertise and  time. 

CMMS helps here through its ability to automate many of the processes that drive a  successful predictive maintenance approach. A CMMS can act as a central repository of  information for all a plant’s activities. When a condition monitoring sensor issues an alert,  such as for high vibration levels or a shift in performance data, that alert triggers a  response to the CMMS. 

The CMMS responds to the alert trigger by quickly compiling all the relevant information  teams will need to address the problem. That includes asset health and relevant work order  histories. It also includes a list of all the spare parts and tools that maintenance crews will  need to fix the issue, along with a detailed checklist of tasks broken down into steps. The  CMMS can even check existing employee schedules and make recommendations about how  to prioritize and schedule jobs.

An effective CMMS presents all this contextual information in an organized, easy-to-read  format. The software can even generate work orders in response to data from sensors,  supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems or building management  systems (BMS). This means that no time is lost between the alert and the next maintenance  process. The work orders will automatically include all the relevant information and  directions so that teams can get the job done right the first time.