A Deep Dive Into the Top 15 CMMS Benefits

Maintenance operations aren’t just vital to a facility's production — they’re a lifeline.

An adequate system for managing maintenance tasks and work orders might mean the difference between life and death for a manufacturing facility, with negligence causing productivity to flatline. 

In this digital age, keeping your equipment working and healthy requires more than the traditional analog system.

This article discusses the advantages of having a powerful tool to keep your production centers pumping. Read on to discover the benefits of a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS).

Why Is CMMS Important?

CMMS software helps organize, track, and diagnose assets in a facility or organization. 

This functionality comes with a host of benefits for any organization, ranging from increased manufacturing productivity to higher uptime and customer satisfaction.

Facilities can use the CMMS benefits to strengthen their: 

• Efficiency
• Practice
• Product
• Profits 

15 Benefits of a CMMS System

#1: Organized Maintenance Scheduling

Whether maintenance is needed on massive mechanized equipment or tenant piping, one benefit of a CMMS is that it assists facilities by simplifying maintenance scheduling. 

A CMMS makes it easy for managers to get an overview of their different maintenance strategies — reactive vs. proactive maintenance, for example — and gain insight into specific strategies to see how well tasks are being performed and when to best implement them. 

Some CMMS software may even allow fine-line schedule tuning for any kind of maintenance an organization uses. This means you can support many different maintenance schedules from one centralized place. 

With UpKeep’s CMMS, you can maximize your facility’s scheduling capabilities by easily planning your maintenance schedule to:

• Automatically send work orders to technicians
• Avoid overlapping tasks
• Prioritize critical jobs

#2: Access to Asset Information in Real Time

Without a CMMS, it’s challenging to get a bird's-eye view of your facility’s assets. 

UpKeep’s CMMS allows users to view a wide range of assets and understand the facility’s overall health at a glance. You’ll even have the option to color-code or use symbols to track asset health statuses, work order progress, and more. 

With our CMMS’s visual overview dashboard, your maintenance managers will quickly determine where their attention is needed most through: 

• Data tracking
• Key performance indicators
• IoT predictive maintenance technologies 

UpKeep’s CMMS also lets you filter work orders by area within the facility. If there's a significant maintenance backlog and labor resources are tight, areas with high-need work orders can be tagged as the priority over other areas.

#3: Superior Work Order and Request Management Capabilities

Before the advent of the CMMS, analog work orders involved a tremendous amount of paperwork, sorting, and physical file structures. 

CMMS software enhances work order management by making them easy to categorize. It allows employees to submit work requests and enables managers to track these requests. Work orders can then be assigned to the proper technician or team within the program.

UpKeep’s CMMS capabilities allow some work orders to be automatically generated when certain conditions are met (e.g., a machine's cycle counts, work requests submitted by certain people, and measurements read by condition monitoring sensors).

#4: Safer, Healthier, and More Compliant Facilities 

UpKeep’s CMMS can assist a facility in tracking the health and safety of its employees by serving as a database for pertinent safety materials like safety data sheets and inspection checklists. 

Our maintenance software can process employee injury reports and create data-driven insights, allowing a facility to learn from its mistakes and create a safer working environment. 

UpKeep’s data-tracking capabilities make it possible for facility managers to easily spot trends in accidents and hazards and respond by making responsible equipment decisions to: 

• Increase safety 
• Diminish accidents
• Ensure a facility remains as regulation-compliant as possible

In addition to data tracking, a CMMS platform orchestrates lock-out tag-out procedures for facility events, which can prevent the release of hazardous energy and unexpected equipment re-energization during maintenance activities. 

#5: Streamlined Tracking of Cost and Purchase Orders

A vital benefit of a CMMS is that it saves money, and not just by reducing events like costly breakdowns or accidents.

A CMMS can help manufacturers and businesses track costs related to equipment maintenance processes, such as labor or parts usage. 

UpKeep’s comprehensive CMMS simplifies tracking costs and purchase orders by:

• Providing cost visibility through an intuitive dashboard
• Ensuring consistent cost records
• Creating purchase orders through the system and linking them to specific work orders or assets
• Inputting and tracking all costs associated with maintenance activities like parts, labor, and energy use
• Providing insight on current parts inventory (which means no more ordering excess parts)

#6: Less Administrative Hassle

A CMMS helps alleviate some administrative burdens by automating tasks that would otherwise require constant supervision and time-consuming data analysis.

This also reduces the number of details a facility maintenance team needs to commit to memory. Over time, the facility becomes more reliable and more automated, freeing up the maintenance team to work on critical priority issues.

Plus, UpKeep allows users to integrate communication apps within the system to submit work orders and speak with technicians, all from one convenient location. 

#7: Simplified Record-Keeping

Another of the CMMS benefits is it allows all users to record and access documentation from a single place. 

UpKeep’s CMMS also enables them to:

• Create notes on current work orders
• View previous work orders for equipment
• Access maintenance manuals and checklists
• View warranties and safety guides

By creating a system of optimized record-keeping and documentation access, technicians can: 

• Perform and repair equipment more quickly
• Avoid making mistakes that would potentially void warranties
• Create an environment that limits accidents or avoidable damage

#8: Reduced Downtime

Regardless of which industry you’re in, downtime means money lost. And, depending on your scale, it could make a significant impact on your downline. 

According to a survey of 450 manufacturing facilities:

• Roughly 82% of the companies experienced unplanned outages lasting an average of four hours and costing an average of $2 million.
• Unexpected downtime may lead to a loss of customer trust and productivity. Of companies surveyed about their experiences with downtime, 46% couldn’t use their services, 37% lost production time on a critical asset, and 29% were completely incapable of servicing or supporting specific equipment or assets.
• 70% of respondents lack awareness of when and how often their equipment should be maintained, which may ultimately lead to increased equipment failure.

UpKeep’s CMMS helps eliminate preventable downtime caused by equipment failure or poor maintenance planning by simplifying maintenance scheduling and work order submittal. 

If you want to decrease your equipment and asset downtime by up to 26%, it’s time to invest in a better maintenance management solution. Keep up with your maintenance with UpKeep.

#9: Increased Equipment Longevity 

In manufacturing, asset health is the heartbeat of production — which makes UpKeep’s CMMS software the doctor who schedules regular treatment to ensure your equipment lives a long, healthy life. 

UpKeep’s maintenance software allows users to: 

• Access a central way of viewing, diagnosing, and improving asset health
• Ensure maintenance stays right on schedule
• Manage work orders to guarantee effective maintenance
• Prioritize certain machines
• Monitor KPIs and equipment status

By automating PM/PdM schedules and providing high-level asset overviews, managers can create a productive manufacturing environment and ensure maximum uptime without shortening equipment lifespan.

#10: Waste and Cost Reduction

According to previous studies, maintenance can cost a facility anywhere between 15-70% for production costs and around 25% on average for overall costs. Experts suggest that 30% of these costs are unnecessary and may be attributed to poor planning, downtime, and neglected preventive maintenance tasks.

UpKeep helps facilities protect their maintenance budgets from unnecessary expenditures by:

• Organizing and managing preventive and predictive maintenance schedules
• Optimizing inventory management through its enterprise asset management solution
• Streamlining work order processes and tracking labor hours
• Improving asset performance and reliability, which may lead to healthier equipment that lasts longer and breaks down less 

#11: Reduced Maintenance Backlog

Even though some amount of maintenance backlog is to be expected, an extreme amount can have severe negative effects on the performance of your facility’s operations. Not only that, maintenance backlog can have massive financial consequences.

Avoid those unhealthy results with UpKeep’s CMMS which can help equalize resources and maintenance so the backlog doesn’t get unmanageable. Rather than small maintenance jobs that never get done, CMMS software can make sure those tasks are prioritized, scheduled, and assigned to keep the backlog to a minimum.

#12: Streamlined Reporting

Efficient reporting is a significant step in measuring maintenance KPIs and identifying ways to reduce costs and deal with chronic equipment issues and streaming processes. Antiquated manual reporting systems can be monotonous and time-consuming and can leave the door open for a variety of mistakes.

CMMS software helps by:

• Using reporting templates to organize maintenance data 
• Sending reports automatically on a prescribed schedule
• Tracking costs, labor, trends, and recurring problems
• Providing a range of reports for different maintenance tasks and workloads

#13: Accessibility to Historic Data

Having historical data at your fingertips is necessary to manage an asset through its entire lifespan. Though technicians may have a wide range of information on how an asset has performed, there’s no guarantee they will be around when the information needs to be accessed.

That’s why historical data serves your operation best through a CMMS. With separate records for each asset, including repairs, inspections, labor hours, and more, key details are just a few keystrokes away to help you communicate effectively or troubleshoot problems.

#14: Improved Team Communication

Everyone knows the chaos that can ensue when team communication is lacking or isn’t a priority. You can avoid the mayhem with a CMMS system with mobile capabilities. 

UpKeep’s mobile-first software means you can complete work from anywhere — things like managing work orders, tracking maintenance costs, and closing work orders instantly. All of this results in more efficient team communication and keeping everyone on the same page and aware of the latest updates and input.

#15: Enhanced Employee Morale

Maybe one of the most important CMMS benefits is the effect it has on employee morale and productivity. Increased employee morale is a win for everyone, workers and managers alike. 

CMMS systems boost team drive and spirit by creating work environments that include:

• Fewer equipment emergencies and less overtime
• More opportunities for effective collaboration
• Reporting that allows for employee recognition
• Easier resource management with analytics and dashboards
• Clear guidance from manuals, checklists, and SOPs
• Confidence that comes with fewer safety incidents
• Quick responses to maintenance issues

How You Can Reap the Benefits of CMMS Systems With the Help of UpKeep

UpKeep’s CMMS merges maintenance management, enterprise asset management, IoT implementation, and comprehensive integration to produce a powerful tool that helps users optimize their maintenance processes. 

With the help of our advanced software, your facility can experience the other benefits of our CMMS, such as:

• Reduced maintenance response time
• Streamlined communication with unlimited free requesters
• Decreased equipment and asset downtime by up to 26%
• Consistent cost records
• Extended asset and equipment lifetimes by up to 11%
• Up to 652% ROI
• And more

Learn more about our revolutionary maintenance management software or schedule a free demo today.