In this month’s CMMS webinar, Craig Shepard discussed how you can improve your maintenance performance before the New Year. He provided a maintenance checklist that states a number of things you should be doing to improve performance, control costs and maximize labor. Make sure your maintenance management system is working properly with this webinar and start the New Year off right.
The webinar was recorded and is available for you to view below.
Webinar Transcription
My name is Craig Shepard. I’m a regional account manager with MicroMain and welcome to the monthly MicroMain webinar. This one is End of the Year Maintenance Checklist. Now before I get going, I’ve got the first slide, and it is going to be a brief survey. I just want to kind of get a feel for what everyone in my audience here is using or not using, so if you will just take a minute to please fill this out and the “Using CMMS software” means you already have maintenance management software, “Considering a change,” obviously you have one but you’re looking at maybe possible alternatives, “Home-grown system” are you using Outlook, are you using Excel or perhaps your IT department put together one for you and then of course the last category is “Not using a CMMS at all.
So, I will give you another minute here if you would, just click one of those 4 boxes so I can get a feel for who’s out there. We’re going to skip to the results. So at least of the accrued who is on here, all of you are using… oh we’ve got some late ones are popping up. So, we have 83% of you are using a CMMS, and we have 16% not using CMMS. That’s fine. What I’m prepared to do is just talk really about the end of the year here.
As I mentioned, it’s the end of the year maintenance checklist, so whether you’re using a program or not, this will be applicable to you to determine if what you have is working for you and here we are at the end of the year and what better time than to start preparing for the new year and evaluate what you’re doing. Let me get this going here.
Now is a good time to review and reevaluate and make adjustments to your maintenance management process. So whether you’re using a program or not, it’s good to look back and see what you’re doing. If you’re using a program, are you getting complete, reliable data to manage your maintenance process? Does that data include enough detail? If you’re not using a program, these are some things you need to consider. How are you going to set it up? Again, and what do you want to get out of it? So with regard to are you getting the complete, reliable data to manage your maintenance process? The number one, are your assets and equipment entered correctly? Is your database actually put together correctly? Again, how is it set up? Do you have properties, multiple properties? Do you have buildings? Do you have departments? Have you standardized services and accounts and maintenance categories and asset groups so that you can get out standardized reports out of the reporting side because any good maintenance management software package will allow you to report by numerous types of categories and services and accounts. So again, perhaps you’re a manufacturing plant and you have four plants and each plant may have three different buildings. Are you building these hierarchies and then of course with regard to your actual equipment and assets? Are you tracking facility maintenance for the offices and spaces? And then you are also, of course, tracking all of your equipment maintenance. Another thing about looking back and reevaluating is “Are you closing work orders and PMs on a timely basis and are you actually enter in all that information?”
It’s always amazing to me that many customers – many people I talk to – they go through the bother of putting all these various pieces of information in yet they’re not closing out the work orders, and they’re not putting all this information in when they’re closing them out. If you’re not logging all this information, you can’t get the reports out that you need and it’s an exercising utility so to speak. So again, go back, reevaluate what you’re doing. Review what types of things you want to get out. What’s important to you? Also as I mentioned here, does the data you’re putting in have enough detail? Of course, that’s important as well. You can only get reports out based on what you put in as you all know. What kind of additional information do you need on your assets to get good maintenance practices out on the backend? Do you track things by manufacturers and models and serial numbers? Are they in there and are they correct? Are your assets assigned to department? Are your parts assigned to classes and categories so you can track all the use? Do you have asset specifications with parameters like high-low readings for temperature and pressure? So again, all of these things may be important to you so when you’re looking back at your existing – or even if you don’t have one – these are things you need to look and think about and say, “What do we need to get out? What’s important to us?” because that dictates what kind of data you’re going to put in on the frontend.
Here’s a screenshot of MicroMain. This is just a screenshot of our assets form and you notice some of the things I was just talking about. You have the name and the asset which can be anything you want, but we have levels for property, for building, for parent/child or sub-asset relationships, for floors, control numbers for bar-coding. You can assign this asset to manufacturers and model and serial numbers in groups and sub-groups and accounts and departments. That allows you to run reports by all these. I can run with a click of a button. This isn’t live… we’ll go live later, but I can run a work order history using work order software for this piece of equipment, see everything I’ve ever done, everything I’ve ever spent. I can draw a summary which is more of a life cycle… month, year and life to date for that piece of equipment. Everything I’ve ever done and spent on it. Also, because I filled in these other fields, I can now run reports for groups and for accounts and for departments. So again, the touch of information you put in determines what kind of reporting you get out. So, when looking back at what you’ve done or if you’re looking forward, and you don’t have a CMMS, and you’re looking forward to what you want to get out of it, these are things to consider.
Here’s another screenshot of the asset form. These are all menu items as well, so I’m going to go to one of the other menu items. This is the cost and details page. If you want to track replacement cost and run replacement projections and depreciation schedules and total cost of ownership, if that’s important to you in your organization, tracking and maintenance, this is the type of data you need to put in there.
I mentioned specifications. You can specify things, information about any piece of equipment or any asset whether it’s in office or whether it’s a piece of equipment. If it’s an office, you may want information handy about the paint type and color and the carpet type and color. You may want on a piece of equipment things like sofa size and type. You might even want to be able to put in readings and measurements and highs and lows so there’s a multitude of information that you need to consider when you’re setting it up and upon review you want to make sure, as I mentioned, that you’re getting out the right kind of information and that all is dependant on what you’ve put in.
Once we have taken a look at what we’re doing and what processes were working and not working, we want to plan improvements to these processes. We want to review and update the maintenance management processes, and you want to optimize for that today. So going forward, you want to say what’s working, what’s not working, what are we lacking that we wanted to be able to do. You also want to clean up your data and ensure your reporting is accurate and that your performance issues are minimized. That’s really a two-part thing. Cleaning up the data means you have up-to-date data, that you don’t have old piece of equipment, old PMs, non-existent things in there. In terms of also cleaning up data, you may have illegal characters and all because databases are tricky like that. There may be certain characters that are not allowed that can actually create performance issues as well. Also, if you allow the database to just continue to get larger and larger with nonsense data, it slows down performance over time so you want to clean up your data. You also, of course, want to run end of year reports and gather your actionable data and that’s probably the most important step because running these reports on your data that’s important to you, and you can determine how you’re doing. And these reports are crucial in identifying your problem areas and determine what actions you need to take to move forward to improve your maintenance management processes. So, for example, you might have reports regarding budgeted versus actual, how you’re doing in your various departments or categories of budgeted versus your actual cost.
What are your highest maintenance issues… there are reports for those and you can identify trouble spots. Are you tracking failure codes, why you were doing the work? Is it because of vandalism, defective parts, how many work orders for those, how much are you spending on those? Or, you can look in maintenance efficiencies and labor efficiencies with regard to how many work orders are you doing on time, how many are past due. Labor efficiencies as well, same thing… do you have certain people who are always – if you estimate your labor – are they always taking longer than expected, do they have a lot of past due work orders and PMs. So all those types of reports will allow you to kind of get a feel and sense of how you’re doing and maybe what you need to do to improve your processes.
Once you do that, you can plan a budget to meet your goals for 2014. Maybe the reports tell you that you have way too many past due work orders or that certain people just can’t seem to complete all their work orders. Maybe, if you have it in your budget, you might have to plan for somebody new. Maybe you have parts inventory because any good CMMS, and ours certainly does it, will allow you to track all parts usage, and at the end of the year, you can run reports that show parts that weren’t used or excess inventories. Maybe you can use the reports to cut down on parts that are obsolete or parts that you’ve over ordered or not used. So again, all these reports help you to plan for next year and then of course you want to turn and implement the new programs and improve your performance and reduce costs.
So, we’re going to take a look at some of these and let’s look first at optimizing you’re maintenance management processes. You want to analyze the total cost of maintenance and identify your opportunities and that way you can improve those processes and reduce cost. And to do that you want to look at pretty much everything in there. Your work orders, your assets, your parts, facilities, labor. For instance on work orders… first of all in regard to processes. What is the flow? Is it adequate for your needs? How are you getting in what I call a work order on schedule, your corrective maintenance, demand or urgency? Are they coming in on a timely basis and are they being signed and issued to people on a timely basis? It’s important to know what your process is.
Are they coming in via email or are people just yelling over to you or calling you and are you forgetting to put them in. You may want to look at a web request module that allows people to automatically fill out a form when they have a work request, and it automatically goes into the program and sends alert emails, and it gives you a nice audit trail so everyone knows that the work is in there and they can check on the status anytime. So, these are the things you need to look at to see if you can improve your process. MicroMain certainly offers a web request module that does where people can… it really automates the whole process and simplifies the process of getting the work request into the system and alerting people that these work orders are in.
With regard to your asset, you want to analyze a cost. You want to see… any good maintenance management software, again, you should look at making sure you can get an asset history. You can look at the total cost of all work done to any piece of equipment, any asset regardless if it’s corrective or preventive maintenance, scheduled, unscheduled maintenance. And you can track the labor, you can track your parts usage and other costs, and you should be able to retain complete work order histories. So again, look at what you’re doing. Do you have too many work orders for maintenance work orders for any particular piece of equipment? If so, maybe it’s time to readjust your PM schedule for that piece of equipment. Or, maybe it’s time to replace that piece of equipment. Again you have to look at all these different sectors, work orders and assets, your parts and your labor. Who’s doing what? Are they doing it in a timely manner? Are they completing the work? So you want to look at these processes. How they’re getting assigned and are these people completing it? Maybe if they’re not completing, it is because they’re coming in with the paperwork order and handing it back to you. Perhaps it’s time to look at all the handheld functionality because you don’t have time to update all the work orders and complete them because you have stacks and stacks of paper, maybe it’s time to let them do it themselves, and they can do it either by logging in and doing it in the system, but these days you have all these smart phones and notebooks and iPads, and we have an application – as any good CMMS will have – applications to allow these people to pretty much do all of their work and close them out on the handheld. So again, you’re going to look at the processes and see what you can do to reduce your cost and improve the process.
You also want to track your preventive maintenance, and again, is the plan you have in place an effective plan? And with regard to that, again, how did you set it up? Are the frequencies correct? Do you have sufficient instructions that are concise so that the people go out and they know exactly what they need to do? Are you adding documents that you have documents from the original manufacturer that you can attach so there’s no question about what is a successful PM with the instructions straight from the manufacturer? Do you have parts that you are assigning to these PMs, and do the maintenance techs know what those parts are instantly when they go to do their PM work order? And again, you need to even track how you are assigning and releasing these parts and closing out the inventory and updating. All of that you have to consider if you want to improve your process. And in MicroMain, at least, when you set up your PMs you can pre-assign your labor whether it’s staff or vendors, you can pre-assign parts that are needed, you can add documents, you can add instructions and lock out and tag out issues, you can add inspection reports where they can go out with an inspection telling them what to do, what to look for. They can take measurements and readings, update those, pass and fail them, create corrective work orders right there from that failed inspection point and track all those failed inspections as well as any of those readings using charts and graphs or just reports. So again, if you’re going out, putting your preventive maintenance you want to make sure that the plan you’re putting together is adequate and the frequencies are correct. And by that I mean you might have a PM that you have that’s maybe a quarterly PM but you’re finding out over here that you have an asset that’s breaking down every six weeks.
Well, if it’s breaking down every six weeks, and you only have every three months a PM on it, maybe it’s time to 1) adjust the PM and shorten the life span of the PM so maybe it’s every six weeks to two months, or it might be time to replace that asset. Look into replacing and again, you’re reviewing your equipment, there’s another piece of this puzzle, review your equipment histories and identify plans to replace [unintelligible – 16:26]. In the MicroMain program, we have a host of reports that you can look at. Everything you’ve ever done to any piece of equipment, any asset and you can run reports. For instance, on my next screen here is a sample report, “Asset Total Cost of Ownership” so you can see what you paid for it, when you bought it, what the install date was and salvage value, useful life. You can run replacement projection reports and here you can see, so far, I don’t have a lot in here but total cost of ownership to date. There are plenty of those reports that will allow you to determine whether it’s time to replace assets.
Now another piece of that puzzle that we mentioned earlier on one of the earlier slides was cleaning up your data, and I alluded to it briefly. One is, as I mentioned, are all your completed work orders closed? And have obsolete work orders been cancelled? Again, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve talked to customers who will say – or people coming from other firms looking at our software – and saying that they can’t seem to get the information, they can’t get the techs to close out the work orders, or they don’t have time themselves. Well, if that’s the problem then you need to reevaluate what your process is and that maybe it’s time to move to mobile and allow the techs to close these things on their own. Because if you’re not closing them, if you’re not completing these work orders, then you’re not capturing all the information about the asset history or the departments or the cost centers or whatever it is that you’re trying to track. Also, I mentioned cleaning up naming conventions used for assets and parts, are they appropriate still? Is everyone using them consistently? If not, then maybe you need to rename them or get rid of them all together and make new ones. Again, naming conventions for assets you want to make sure everyone is calling something the same so they’re all referring to it and everyone knows what they’re talking about.
Also, as you’re cleaning up your database, you want to look and make sure that the assets have been removed from the operation. If you have a piece of equipment that is no longer being used you need to inactivate them and then you take them off the PMs. You don’t want to have the excess assets sitting there, it just builds the list and makes it harder to find things so get rid of them. Remove assets and equipment and PMs that aren’t being used. Same thing with labor lists and wage rates by the way. If you have people who are no longer there, inactivate them. If your labor has new wage rates, and if you’re assigning labor and cost and the cost of pulling hours based on the wage rates, you need to update those rates. So again, there are a lot of things to be done when you’re looking at cleaning up your data.
I also mentioned running year end reports. Again, I mentioned that that was probably one of the most important things at the end of the year to see how you’re doing and here’s just a few items. Did your on-demand work order execution meet goals? In other words, are they being done on a timely basis? There are a multitude of reports in MicroMain that will show you all of your past due work orders 30 days out, 60 days out, 90 days out, year end reports that tell you how you’re doing, what percentage of your work orders were done on time, what percentage were done or were overdue. Were your preventive maintenance work orders effective? Again I mentioned that earlier. Do they have the right instructions? Are they doing the right procedures when they go out there and are they able to track when they go out to do a PM what they’re doing, and if there are problem areas, were you able to create corrective maintenance work orders right there and then and track all that. Ultimately, hopefully minimizing your equipment downtime because if you were doing your PMs, you shouldn’t have as many trouble calls and your equipment downtime should start to fall which is a cost savings especially in the world of production, manufacturing. Every time your machine is down, that’s lost production.
I mentioned earlier was labor used efficiently. You need to examine your flow and how are you assigning work. Do your maintenance techs get alerts immediately when something comes their way? Are they assigned by someone who is an administrator of the program or are they automatically assigned based on some variables such as they’re on a particular shop and a particular property. Again, you want to look at these because you want things to run as efficiently and smoothly and automated as possible. You also want to of course look to your parts inventory that they’re maintained at the appropriate level. There are two sides to that. There’s all the waste and parts that were never used, you have whole inventories of parts and you eventually have to write them off, and then there’s the other side where you don’t have enough parts and you have PMs scheduled, and they go out there and there’s no parts and you shut down production perhaps, and you don’t have the proper parts in inventory and now you’re waiting for them. Or, simply if maybe since the corrective maintenance work order and now it’s on hold because you had to go out and order parts.
So again, it’s important to maintain your parts at an appropriate level, account for them because parts are a huge expense in the whole maintenance budget. MicroMain has a variety of reports that lets you track all of your parts usage throughout the program, every work order, every PM, you can assign parts, it tracks all usage, you can create reports if you get below min. You can have min./max. order amounts and use purchasing to reorder it and automatically bring in the parts and replenish the supply so you always know when you have reports on hand.
So again, year end reports are really going to give you all the information on how am I doing, things like I didn’t mention but meantime between failure, it will show you what assets… how long assets were up or down, past due rates, completion rates, all those types of things are available to you.
Here are a couple of reports out of MicroMain. Not a lot of information in my little sample database I took them from, but you can get the gist of it. Maintenance management efficiency analysis tells you again, the percentage completed on time or completed late and total work orders. So again, these are by priority so you can see various priorities of how you’re doing. These are sample reports. If you out service request in and you standardize them so everyone is calling it the same thing so if it’s a check air conditioner, one person’s now putting in “too cold” and another’s now putting in “it’s chilly in my office” and someone else is putting in something else; if you make service requests that they pick from, then you can pull meaningful reports to see how many work orders you’re doing and what the estimated and average times are. You can also see how many work orders you’re doing or the cost of these particular services are. So again, the data set up allows you to pull these types of reports out on the backend. So when you’re looking at your program or if you’re looking into getting a program, these are the things you may want to strive to be able to do when getting the data out.
Same thing with labor and productivity, I mentioned earlier, how is your staff doing, estimated versus actual, you also have… and the next one we’ll show you not only – kind of a different format of this – showing estimated but also scheduled and unscheduled and percentage late. So you can see if you have either people who are always late and it may not be the person, it might be that you need someone else on your staff. So again, it’s just a way for you to go in and analyze what you’re doing and how you’re doing and then make the necessary changes. Here’s another one just for overall your highest maintenance issues, for instance, this one is telling me that I have… not a lot of information but it will give me the top 25 assets with the highest maintenance issues in there and it will show you what they are and what’s going on. It allows you to identify trouble spots. Trouble spots mean either you need to replace the asset or maybe you’re not maintaining it or maybe your PMs are too far apart and it’s an action item and it’s a way for you to go back and maybe you have to reevaluate what you set up and how you set it up.
One of the other items we mentioned earlier was plan a budget. Now, in planning a budget, comparing your actual maintenance cost against your budget, and as I mentioned, you can do this in many ways depending on what you put in. So, if you’re at the end of the year and you’re looking back and you don’ have reports that allow you to do these things, you might need to reevaluate. Some of the reports I want to show you briefly, this is a completed work order by a property. So, at the end it shows my labor, my parts, my other costs and my totals. You can do these types of reports for a particular piece of equipment by a building, by a site, by a group of assets, by pretty much anything you want. Those types of reports are very, very important to get out to know how you’re doing. That a scorecard so to speak. Budget comparison by account. If you set up accounts and you assign them either to assets, or work order and PMs it will keep track of what you’ve expended and what you’ve budgeted and what your variances are. It tells you how you’re doing. Or by categories; you can set up maintenance categories, HVAC and plumbing and this, that and the other and what you expended versus budgeted and your variance. So again, it’s a scorecard for how you’re doing. And here’s one by department.
Also, with regard to budgeting, are you planning on implementing any new programs or upgrading any tools? In MicroMain, we have a couple of modules that can really help you to get ahead so to speak and get ahead of the curve certainly and one is MicroMain mobile which allows you to access all your work orders and PMs in the field and to create new work orders in the field. That streamlines your operation. Your maintenance techs instantly have their work orders and PMs, can do anything on the handheld, and it streamlines the operation, gets things done quicker and also there’s a better likelihood they’re going to be completed rather than handing a stack of papers back to some admin who then has to put everything in. And they can do everything from putting on their labor hours and parts and inspections and pretty much everything. We also have a web request module. Online submission for your demand work orders. It triggers alerts, it sends emails and it can check the status anytime. It sends them an email letting them know it was successfully sent and it also sends an email for letting them know it’s been completed. So again, it streamlines the operation. These are things – if you’re not using them – and you’re looking back and you’re saying, “Geeze, a lot of our work requests aren’t getting into the system, or they’re not getting logged in or a lot of our work orders are in the system but they’re not getting closed. You might think about these types of things to hasten the process and streamline the process. Also, barcoding of assets, again, it’s about automating. You can scan barcodes on assets and parts, look at PMs and work orders or to add parts to a work order PM.
Also including budgeting … we properly train. On the front end, a lot of people go out and buy software but the hesitate to get the necessary training and software is frankly only as good as the information you put in and also only as good as the training you get on the frontend so you know how to use it. You know how to set it up. You know you can discuss what’s important to put in so that you can get out what you need. So maybe you have to identify some new training for existing staff or maybe training for new personnel. So you want to make sure that you’re budgeting for that.
And then of course, you’re going to take all this information that you’ve gathered and implement a new program or change your existing program you’re going through when you start putting in additional information and make sure that you’re getting out what you need so you’re gonna be able to fully utilize the software, get reliable data, train your team, whether you have one person go to training and come back as training the trainer, or you have the whole team there and get on-site training. These are the things that will help you be successful in the new year. And also, as I mentioned preventive maintenance to meet your needs. If you have PMs, but they don’t have good solid information of what you’re supposed to do and action plans for if they’re not up to speed then they’re not very helpful.
That is all I have. I think we’re up on 30 minutes. I was going to actually go into some of the MicroMain screenshots but I think – the actual live program – but I think we’re at the 30 minutes, so I appreciate you sitting through the 30 minutes and if you have questions I will be on the chat and happy to answer any questions that I see. And thank you again for coming to the end of the year maintenance checklist. If you have any questions, of course, this will all be recorded and sent to you and my information will be there as well. Or, depending on where you are, your regional account manager and I would be happy to answer any questions you have.
With that we’ll open up to any questions we might have. If there are no questions, I’m going to stop the meeting, and I appreciate again everyone coming and feel free to give us a call if you have any further questions. info@micromain.com