Balancing low costs and high levels of output are consistently on the minds of manufacturers. These often become difficult to accomplish when juggling a multitude of other objectives. A CMMS can help you alleviate these objectives while turning your other headaches into big wins for your department. Check out five achievements you can gain for your company when you implement a CMMS.
1. Decrease equipment downtime
On average, manufacturers experience 800 hours of downtime per year, which is a little over 2 hours per day. The time and money required to fix these equipment failures hurts output levels and increases labor and equipment costs.
A CMMS allows you to schedule and track preventive maintenance to ensure each asset receives the proper care it needs, ultimately reducing these equipment failures. For example, Seattle Sun Tan reduced operational downtime from 3 days to less than a day on emergency tickets once they implemented a CMMS.
In addition, the system can predict the next time a piece of equipment will break based on data from downtime tracking software, and alert you in advance. This approach allows you to schedule downtime for these repairs at a time that won’t disrupt your daily processes, saving you time and money.
2. Start preventing fires instead of putting them out
Reacting to equipment failures is sometimes necessary, but not always the best solution. Preventive maintenance saves organizations an average of 12–18% in costs when compared to reactive maintenance. This is because routinely checking your equipment, and finding issues before they escalate, allows your team to make repairs during a scheduled period of downtime.
With a CMMS, you can set a time-based or meter-based preventive maintenance task to occur at an interval of your choosing. You will be alerted when it’s time to complete this task and can set up instructions outlining what your team needs to do to successfully execute it. This keeps your processes standard across the plant and ensures everyone is executing tasks properly.
3. Increase team efficiency
Budget and staff cuts often impact your ability to keep up with increasing maintenance demands, and decrease your team’s effectiveness and efficiency.
A CMMS can track how many labor hours are being spent on certain equipment items and work orders, and can detail the amount of labor each team member is performing on any given machine and in any given time frame. This allows you to evaluate where each person’s time is best spent based on their unique labor efficiency and the equipment’s needs.
In addition, data like this can be used to justify capital and labor expenditures. By detailing the number of maintenance repairs, labor hours, equipment downtime, and inventory costs in a quarterly report, you can prove that your team needs more resources to efficiently run the department.
4. Pass audits and inspections with flying colors
One of the most stressful times of the year is audit season, because if the tiniest thing is out of place, it could mean bad news for your plant.
A CMMS makes passing audits as easy as possible. That’s because the software keeps an extremely thorough backlog of all the maintenance that has been done on each piece of equipment. Maintenance staff can easily pull these reports up to verify compliance needs and get through audits.
In addition, a CMMS can store required documentation such as product requirement documents and manufacturing build packages, so that you can showcase anything asked for during the process.
5. Maintain proper inventory levels
With inventory constantly passing through your plant, it’s important to keep the appropriate amount on hand. Inventory surpluses add storing costs, and outages cause panic, lost opportunity costs, lost time, and more.
A CMMS keeps a log of all inventory and that inventory can be associated with work orders and preventive maintenance tasks. So, when a technician uses a belt to repair a machine, they can update the inventory in real time to reflect the usage.
In addition, the software will alert you when an item hits its minimum quantity level (dictated by you) and remind you to order more. According to the findings of CPIM (Certified in Production and Inventory Management) Andrew Gager, a typical organization overstocks their inventory by 29%—be better than ordinary and keep your inventory lean to reduce unnecessary costs.
Improve your processes, your team’s productivity, and your company with a CMMS. Check out FMX!
About FMX
FMX offers a manufacturing maintenance software that will increase your bottom line, improve productivity, and ultimately cut costs. Our solution minimizes unplanned downtime, which helps streamline your operations. FMX also decreases work order resolution time, organizes all preventive maintenance tasks, and allows you to effectively manage your equipment and assets.
