What Are the Benefits of CMMS?

A Deep Dive Into the Top 10 Benefits of CMMS Software

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 benefits of CMMS to strengthen their: 

• Efficiency
• Practice
• Product
• Profits

10 Benefits of CMMS

#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 CMMS is that it saves money, and not just by reducing events like costly breakdowns or accidents.

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

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 significant benefit of CMMS 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 recent research conducted by ServiceMax through 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 to 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.