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By Chinta Srinivasan, Application Consultant |
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INTRODUCTION
The primary objective of this
paper is to present a general overview in the selection
of a Computerized Maintenance Management System and building a Strategy
Team. The field of Maintenance
Management is changing as rapidly as any other field of management.
The term Maintenance have undergone tremendous changes in recent years
and CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management Systems)
have been there at every turn. A lot of new techniques, methods and
procedures have been developed by various experts in the specific areas to
enable and raise the reliability of Industrial Process. These include
Preventive Maintenance, Planning Systems, Various Analysis methods,
Condition Monitoring and so on. However, these techniques are often implemented
in an uncoordinated manner without having the full understanding of
the consequences of the methods
or techniques on the cost of Maintenance or
the reliability of the process. In
this paper, I will be giving some
guidelines, which shall help the user while planning to have a CMMS. MAINTENANCE OBJECTIVE
Setting an Objective for
Maintenance is not an easy task
in today’s world. Due to the
changes in the Industry for the
last five decades, the demands also have been changed. Old habits die hard. Equipment
vendors and manufacturers cannot know what the end user require from Equipment. The
requirements and the operating conditions of the Equipment may be different for different organizations and in turn require
different maintenance strategies. The
generic Maintenance programs supplied by the Manufacturer may not take these
into consideration. End user should
be aware of one thing. The area which he feel critical or crucial might be an area where the
manufacturer’s source of profit from the sales and service point of view.
Therefore, there is a potential conflict of interest for manufacturers
between developing a maintenance program that is best for you i.e. the
end user, and one that is best for
them. The
Industry forces to have a focus on equipment reliability, as well as availability, a push towards
zero downtime or zero in-service breakdowns. To
achieve these aims, the key application tools such as Reliability Centered
Maintenance (RCM) and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)
should be looked into. The CMMS tools available in the market has
enhanced the ability of Maintenance managers to much more efficiently track,
monitor and analyze the aspects of the maintenance.
State-of-art maintenance software does little good if users don’t use
it correctly. It all depends on how one use the system to achieve their
Maintenance goals. Basing on the Industry, one has to set the Objective(s).
Ultimately the Maintenance
Objective briefly
to say could be: To
keep all the facilities of the
Plant to be available in acceptable condition all the time. In other words to
say is to Eliminate the process Interruptions. STRATEGY
FOR A SUCCESSFUL CMMS
One
can really save money with proper Maintenance. The primary function of any
Maintenance is to optimize the
Life-Cycle costs of the Organization’s assets. A suitable plan and mix of
maintenance types is needed in order to establish the optimal resources
utilization which can contribute to the profit of the Organization. Normally
people buy CMMS to solve some specific problems. In fact
if you look into all the functions and try to use them to the utmost
possible extent, I think the
organizations can have a better control on their maintenance strategies.
In order to avoid the most common pitfalls while choosing a Computerized
Maintenance Management System, the
following things mentioned below could help you. These may not be in a order.
But you may summarize as per your need. PLANNING, SCHEDULING, MAINTENANCE
HISTORY & REPORTING
1.
Should allow to view the
detail planning information, regarding the work plan, costs, resources like
labor, materials and tools,
equipment, schedule, status of the work, related
documents with ease. 2.
Should allow to enter simple or detailed day-to-day maintenance requests. 3.
Generate preventive
maintenance work orders individually, batch
or automatically. 4.
Cluster PM work orders to take advantage of unplanned downtime. 5.
Define and sequence work for multiple assets based on location and /or
equipment. 6.
Analyze the Inspection data to support Predictive Maintenance. 7.
Facilitate labor scheduling with labor standards by task, ability to sort
by work orders by location of work,
craft and other ways. 8.
Divide job plans sequentially, each with its own parts, labor and tool
estimates. 9.
Maintain personnel files for each employee’s attendance, vacation, sick
and non-productive work time. Track overtime history and individual pay rates. 10.
Maintain detailed company, service contract, and tool records for
use to analyze the maintenance work. 11.
Create schedules for
equipment, craft, and labor records. 12.
Compare real-time budgets or estimates against actual and historical
work orders. 13.
Provide information for work planning, scheduling, and job assignments.
Has the capability to store and retrieve work plans, copy old work plans, and
modify the existing plans when new information is coming in. 14.
Has ability to generate the
Equipment or Asset history to present with all the summary of the major and
minor repairs. 15.
Sequence multiple job plans and consolidate multiple procedures on one
PM master. 16.
Highlight the situations where PM activity is more expensive than the
breakdown. 17.
Has reports with mean time between failures (MTBF)
that show how often the unit has failed, how many days or machine hours
lapsed between failures, and the duration of each repair. 18.
Should identify the hazards which cannot be eliminated with their
resulting precautions. MATERIAL MANAGEMENT
19.
Create Purchase Requisitions or Purchase Orders for materials and
services. 20.
Automatically create Purchase Orders from Purchase Requisitions, create
agreement purchase orders to
purchase parts over time. 21.
Define multiple tax rates for interstate and international purchasing. 22.
Optimize purchasing efficiency with electronic commerce. 23.
Able to match the Invoice to complete purchasing cycle. 24.
Easy tracking of the Inventory, costs and balances by bin, lot and
storeroom. 25.
Reorder items automatically by shelf life. 26.
View the work order reservations for inventory items. 27.
Identify out-of-stock items or make substitutions with alternate parts,
vendor, and location tracking capabilities. MODELING THE ENTERPRISE
28.
System has a logical location system to locate assets and where work is
done. 29.
System to Track the
Equipment, associated costs, histories and failures of a serialized piece of
equipment as it moves throughout a plant or facility. 30.
Build failure code hierarchies to record equipment problems for analysis. 31.
Risk free integration with multiple financial Systems including
commercial integration to SAP®, Oracle ®, and PeopleSoft ®. 32.
Should support the double entry accounting for complete integration with
any financial system. 33.
Eliminate the duplicate handling of data and ensures upgrade ability to
future versions without any problems. 34.
Should support the electronic commerce facility. 35.
Should allow you to customize comfortably. 36.
A proper security features should be available to safe-guard the
database. OTHERS 37.
The system vendor should be experienced in management of installation
projects of the size of your facility. 38.
It is important that the vendors technical people are well trained in the
software, hardware, reality wear and have experience with maintenance. 39.
The system vendor should be a Professional in providing consultation and
have a big network to support you when you are in need. 40.
Vendor should be an ISO practicing company to ensure the quality of
services. CONCLUSION
Before
I end the session I would like to highlight the importance of handling data when
a CMMS is selected. Organizations, go through many articles about CMMS.
They hear and view many demonstrations
from various vendors on how to justify the cost and optimize the
resources using CMMS. After
going through all these, Organization may take a decision to purchase a
Computerized Maintenance Management System. The system is in place and on line. But…………………….????????
The real big problem arises now. It doesn’t seem to
perform as it did during demonstrations. It is not producing the expected results. WHY
? The
fundamental problem is, ·
How the data was handled in the system ? ·
Is the data collected properly ? ·
Is the data entered properly ? ·
What depth of details are required to produce the results your
Organization need ? The
Data format plays a vital role as
it affect the information when
queried. The data entry should be consistent in order to have the system
to be effective and give the valid and correct information when a query is given or when a report or a graph is asked
for. The
user should know how to collect data, track data, reconfigure and analyze the
information. Data collection and Data entry needs
a proper plan.
User should know how, why, when and where conditions to be applied on
data. User should understand the database
structure and find out the essential fields i.e. Mandatory and what the
relationship between the database
tables. This will give an idea on the
data collection and Data entry. |
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Maintenance
Solutions Business, |
