The Role of CMMS Software in Improving Asset Reliability

If you’re in an asset-intensive industry like process or industrial manufacturing, you rely heavily on your equipment functioning as planned. However, performance and maintenance management of these capital resources is a tedious task. Unexpected production downtime may cost your company tens of thousands of dollars, depending on your hourly output.

Moreover, a recent study shows that the average downtime for manufacturers is around 800 hours per year. If we put it in perspective, that’s almost a solid month of lost opportunities and revenue for your company. Indeed, downtime is unavoidable, yet you can prevent or curtail its disruptive effects on your bottom line with effective maintenance management strategies.

The computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) works like your car maintenance checkup, but on a larger scale. It’s the ideal maintenance approach for assets like heavy machinery in your production lines. It can track your asset’s lifecycle and establish preventative maintenance processes to minimize downtime.

Since we’re talking about physical assets like equipment, let’s further discuss asset reliability and how CMMS software can help your assets’ efficiency, productivity and performance quality.

What’s Asset Reliability?

Asset reliability is the probability that your equipment and systems will function as intended for a given time without failure. It's another way to simply say that your equipment works when you want it to—and need it to perform at a high-level. Indeed, each machine adheres to different maintenance requirements. Hence, CMMS may help you with your preventive maintenance on a predetermined schedule.

A recent report said that unplanned machine downtime in manufacturing is the culprit for less productivity, delays, unhappy customers and revenue loss. It may look less harmful, but it takes away an estimated $50 billion each year from industrial manufacturers.

How Maintenance Management Ensures Asset Reliability

In the emergence of the digital era, manufacturing businesses are continually finding better solutions and more effective ways to do things. These organizations have even transformed from staying reactive to becoming more proactive in their maintenance approach to their assets.

Searching to further support asset reliability drives businesses to seek the ideal solution to their plant and equipment problems. It turns out that maintenance is not only about fixing the machine, but, more importantly, also about making your equipment more reliable throughout its lifecycle. The concept of the preventive maintenance approach can help you improve uptime, performance, longevity and visibility.

Meanwhile, there's an additional connection to performance management by intertwining business goals with asset availability and reliability. Moreover, it incorporates traditional asset management methods and the latest technology, such as cloud-based CMMS, to enhance reliability, execution, production and overall business capabilities.

Maintenance management being analogous to CMMS is a vital component of well-functioning manufacturing operations. It helps guarantee that the production process, utilities and related facilities operate as expected. Businesses can maintain their physical assets while minimizing downtime and costs.

CMMS vs. EAM: Which System for Asset Reliability?

Some of the best providers of CMMS offer a more robust solution that you can easily deploy and scale with you as your business grows known as an enterprise asset management (EAM) system.

While CMMS is focused on maintenance and operations: supporting the maintenance management of your physical assets; automating work orders; and scheduling repairs for emergency and preventive maintenance; EAM software contains all the capabilities and features of CMMS plus more advanced features like preventative maintenance methods, inventory management, workflow analysis, purchasing/procurement and asset lifecycle planning tools.

Benefits of CMMS Software for Asset-Intensive Industries

Let's continue further with the benefits from CMMS software:

• Increased equipment uptime and reduced downtime - making the most out of your assets, CMMS can help increase productivity while alleviating unexpected disruptions.

• Improved maintenance planning and scheduling - plan, track and execute your maintenance strategy whether it is planned preventative maintenance or emergency repairs.

• Enhanced asset performance and lifespan reporting - facilitate KPI and reports within the system. A good CMMS may track 100+ KPIs and reports with accurate data providing you full visibility to your asset health.

Key Capabilities and Features of CMMS and Why They Matter to Your Manufacturing Business

Maintenance management matters; in addition to increased productivity through improved asset reliability, CMMS delivers these significant features:

Asset Management

• Asset tracking and identification - managers can track the location, serial number, model and maker through their CMMS database.

• Maintenance history and documentation - with accurate record-keeping, you can track asset repairs with documentation from the previous technician.

• Condition monitoring and preventative maintenance - CMMS generates real-time data about the condition of your assets. Hence, you can plan preventative maintenance work to minimize downtime.

Work Order Management

• Work request submission and approval - work request automation enables all departments to see the needed requirements for the work order.

• Work order tracking and scheduling - managers and technicians can easily track and schedule work orders to make sure all of them are properly addressed.

• Task assignment and progress monitoring - empower your team to see the progress of work orders and recalibrate their plans when their asset underperformed.

Reporting and Analytics

• Performance metrics and KPI tracking - set and track 100+ KPIs to improve your productivity.

• Data-driven decision-making and trend analysis - real-time information gives you an edge to strategically decide on THE next steps for your assets. You can repair, replace or upgrade an asset based on its condition and your business needs.

Inventory Management and Procurement (available only with EAM)

• Spare parts management and inventory tracking - availability of spare parts and other supplies are found within the EAM database.

• Automated reordering and vendor management - when supplies run low or there’s an unavailable spare part for an asset, find the appropriate vendor and reorder the part from the platform.

• Streamlined inventory management and cost control - EAM can help you reduce costs efficiently by allocating resources, making strategic CapEx decisions and managing MRO.

Asset Reliability in Action: Success Stories of CMMS and EAM Implementation

Let's look at the stories of successful companies that leverage these Aptean solutions to optimize their assets and processes.

Anderson Dahlen Reduced Maintenance Overhead and Downtime

When Anderson Dahlen, a metal fabrication company, made the decision to hire more in-house engineers rather than outsourcing contractors to maintain or repair their assets they required an asset management solution.

Having already leveraged Aptean Industrial Manufacturing ERP, Anderson Dahlen, expanded their solution set with Aptean EAM because they had no cohesive system for maintenance work orders.

Before deploying Aptean EAM, Anderson Dahlen relied solely on expensive outsourced maintenance service providers. They lacked reliable data on asset failures, downtime and response rates.

After implementing Aptean EAM, Anderson Dahlen has reduced maintenance overheads by bringing technical support in-house. They’ve also increased their engineering team by 900% in six months. As a result, they produced a centralized preventive maintenance request to reduce downtime and improve quality of service.

The capability of EAM to store data in one central database brought total visibility to their maintenance operations. It also integrated into their inventory management to help provide accurate real-time parts inventory. Moreover, it captured vital information to help in strategic decision-making. Read more for their full story.

CoreFX Ingredients Improved Visibility and Data-Driven Decisions

CoreFX Ingredients is an innovative manufacturer of dry lipid-based nutritional oils for health, wellness, sports and pet nutrition. They began deploying Aptean EAM to eliminate outdated spreadsheet-based service plans. Our comprehensive EAM system keeps the total cost of equipment ownership low while boosting reliability and uptime.

Moreover, CoreFX Ingredients also deployed Aptean ERP together with their EAM system. These unified and centralized solutions help them improve their visibility over their capital equipment's performance and reliability.

CoreFX Ingredients is now considering the implementation of our Aptean OEE solution to pair with its current Aptean platforms. They successfully leverage Aptean ERP and Aptean EAM rollout to optimize their company's manufacturing processes. Read more for their full story.

UFP Migrated to the Cloud-Optimized Aptean EAM with Ease

UFP Industries is one of the world-leaders when it comes to lumber. Of the business’s more than 130 facilities worldwide, 45 plants in the U.S. have used Aptean EAM for enterprise asset management and computerized maintenance management since 2013.

When the new cloud-based Aptean EAM became available, they didn’t hesitate to begin their migration strategy to capitalize on the modern, mobile-friendly system. UFP enabled their users with secure access to their software from anywhere using their mobile phones and other handheld devices. It also offers enhanced security and supercharged agility to their system.

After their successful migration of three of their plants to the cloud, UFP is now enjoying the software’s intuitive, user-friendly dashboards for visibility and control. UFP has also saved time by streamlining reports, analytics and KPI tracking. Read more for their full story.

Securing an Asset Reliability Solution for You

Asset reliability is not only about reducing repairs and the maintenance work of your physical assets; in a broader sense, as mentioned at the start, its primary focus is to improve your manufacturing assets' uptime, performance, longevity, availability and visibility.

Indeed, asset management is a challenge for most companies that has a direct tie to your bottom line with unexpected downtime and costly maintenance repairs. Deploying a CMMS—or EAM solution—can help you increase equipment uptime, expand asset lifespan, streamline inventory management, automate work order requests and generate data-driven performance reports.

Identifying a solution provider that can implement the best solution for your manufacturing company with the ability to scale and grow as your asset reliability needs grow is key. You may find that you start with a CMMS solution that will let you set up the essential features but find that as your equipment needs to expand you require advanced capabilities and flexibility of an EAM solution.

With Aptean EAM, you're empowered to implement just the CMMS features to start your journey. As you grow and scale, you can upgrade with the more robust EAM features to meet all your business needs and production targets.

Our industry-specific and purpose-built cloud solutions allow you to effectively manage your preventive maintenance planning, work orders, capital equipment and resources; and much more. Book a personalized demo with our team of CMMS and EAM experts today.