Craig details how effective preventative maintenance helps you meet manufacturing production goals and reduce downtime.
Webinar Transcription
Today, we’re going to talk about how maintenance management software supports manufacturing, and we’ll through a few slides and then I’ll go in to the actual MicroMain application so we can talk about some real experience. By the way, I know you’re muted, so if you’re having any issues, there is a chat, and we will stand by and answer the chat as well.
MicroMain located in Austin, Texas, by the way. Everything we do is here. All of my sales team is here, my developers, my support staff. So everybody is here in the Austin, Texas office, and we’ve been providing maintenance software and CAFM space planning software since 1991. Anyway, we have a pretty good history of offering maintenance solutions. A few of our customers range from across all verticals, but as you can see, we have some large manufacturing, Rubbermaid, probably 20 or 30 of their facilities, and quite a few others where they run as either an independent facility or across the board in multiple facilities.
So today we’re going to talk about how maintenance management software, CMMS, Computerized Maintenance Management System, helps manufacturing. And it’s going to help you in a number of ways. It’s going to help you to meet production goals. You’ll be able to meet your plant specific needs by setting up a program tailored to what you need. You’ll be able to maximize your equipment availability and extend your equipment life.
So stop there for a minute. Those top three, typically that happens through setting up and scheduling preventive maintenance, extends the life of your equipment if it’s maintained properly at the proper intervals. You minimize your downtime, and minimizing your downtime keeps your equipment up, keeps you from having to do all corrective maintenance, reactive maintenance. That’s helps you, of course, meet your plan needs and your production goals.
With a good CMMS, you’ll also able to project budget because you will be able to set up not only all of your preventive maintenance, and if you’ve got a setup right, you can estimate your cost for both your labor and your parts usage and any other cost you think you might incur. You can run a report and project how much you might be spending on preventive maintenance over the course of the year. Additionally, you can run reports on what your expenditures were by the entire facility or by equipment groups or by particular piece of equipment for corrective maintenance. You can use that to project what you might be spending the next year.
So again, setting it up correctly and tracking everything is paramount to making sure that you can project to what’s going to happen. Of course, CMMS computerized organize all your data, and schedule and organize your operations. As I mentioned, you can generate all the needed reports, assuming you put all the data in correctly and make well informed decisions. So that in a nutshell is what maintenance software is designed to do. Especially with regard to manufacturing, I think the key is extending that equipment life, keeping it up and running, minimize your downtime and some other factors.
So one, as I mentioned, how do we keep equipment working? Obviously, regularly scheduled preventive maintenance is how you keep it working. If you’re doing regularly scheduled maintenance, you will prevent the breakdowns that happen, and breakdowns are not only cost of having to replace the parts and of the labor but also the lost revenues from your machine being down. So obviously, a regularly scheduled PM will help you maintain the uptime of that machine. Additionally, you might, as you’re doing work orders and you have a PM that’s set up for every two months and maybe you find out that that piece of equipment is breaking down every five or six weeks, you may want to recalibrate that PM if it’s breaking down much sooner than you’re getting to it on a PM. It will give you the ammunition to run those reports meantime between failures to say, “Hey, this piece of equipment is breaking down every five or six weeks, and we have a PM set up every eight weeks. So we need recalibrate that.”
All right, so the next slide I’d just like to know who my audience is there. Are you currently performing preventive maintenance? I’ll give you just a second to either hit the “yes” or the “no”. Let’s get to the results. Right now it’s showing me that 100% of you out there are currently performing preventive maintenance. Again, we have plenty of people that I talk to on a daily basis who are doing preventive maintenance but they’re doing it with paper and pencil. It’s in somebody’s head. So again, what a maintenance program will do is allow you to actually get that into a program regularly scheduled where there is an audit trail. Not only that of what it is you need to do all the steps, maybe checklist, but also an audit trail later on and equipment history so you can see that you’ve done everything that’s required.
Preventive maintenance. Obviously, any maintenance management software as you’re looking at the software packages, you want to make sure that you can do all the preventive maintenance. You want to track your goals, determine your priorities. You want to be able to view a timeline and see what schedule operations look like, what you have coming up on a daily, weekly, monthly. Make sure not only that you have them scheduled but that you have the resources available. You also want to be able to track KPIs, Key Performance Indicators. In MicroMain, that’s typically done through etheir dashboard or reports to make sure that you’re getting out the information that’s required that will help you keep everything running smoothly. Using the mobile on the slide we put mobile at the top. We have a mobile piece. It’s a module that allows your maintenance text to do all your work orders and PMs in the field on a mobile device, any browser base device.
So there if you’re doing it mobile, it’s going to save you time reducing downtime, drive time. Whether it’s a PM or even a corrective maintenance work order they can do it right there on the fly. So the mobile module, which I’ll show you towards the end, allows you a lot of functionality to go out and have your guys ready with the PMs right there on their handhelds where they can go in and do everything from take measurements and readings, pass and fail inspection points, update meters and all that.
Now, for any maintenance scheduling, obviously it’s key to keeping things up and running. Setting up your PMs, it’s an easy way to set up and track your PM schedule. So when you set them up, MicroMain, of course, we support all the calendar base whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual or by any meter. Maybe you’re doing cycle counts of a machine, perhaps hours or runtime, or if it’s some sort of vehicle you’re doing the miles. But as you set up all your PMs, then they will automatically schedule. They will be ready in the queue of work orders and also alert anybody who is assigned to a PM. They get an email alert automatically, if they’re assigned, letting them to know that they have that PM. If you’re using the mobile functionality, it’s available on that handheld device so they can immediately take care of that.
There is also the ability in the MicroMain program at least to do a drag-and-drop scheduling. We get a glance view so that you can go in and see what PMs you have for the week, and then see the available resources for that week. You can actually drag and drop the schedule to allocate the resources correctly.
We have the preventive maintenance circle, if you will, where you start off planning what it is you’re going to do then set up your schedule, schedule the resources. These things automatically run into the work order page where you’re going to your maintenance text, you’re going to execute those and ultimately get out reporting. Now, it’s nice to get the reports out, and it’s nice to be able to evaluate what you will have done but one of the steps that a lot of our customers, a lot of people forget about, is you need to then learn or reevaluate, “Did we get out the correct information? Do we have things set up correctly so that we can get out the information that we need on a timely fashion?”
You should always be revisiting this and going back and saying, “Okay, maybe we need to tweak the plan so we’ve got it on the right schedule, right resources, so on and so forth. Maybe we have the right amount of parts always available.” You can’t go out and do a PM if it requires parts and you don’t have the parts in inventory. So the maintenance software will alert you if you don’t have the parts that are necessary for plan maintenance. So that’s something to keep in mind.
What happens when your equipment is down? Obviously, when equipment is down in any kind of maintenance software, that’s a reactive or corrective maintenance work order. MicroMain allows you to set those up. You can do those either in the MicroMain system or as I mentioned before, on the mobile handheld. So one of your maintenance texts might be out, there’s a problem with the machine. Two seconds, he has got his MicroMain CMMS mobile module open, creates the work order. You can even scan the piece of equipment, scan on parts, time in and time out.
A good maintenance software is going to allow you to be able to track all that maintenance to react immediately especially if you’re using the mobile or if you have the work request module. Maybe you have a request module available to the machine operators. They can instantly input in a request to come fix the machine, goes into the MicroMain program, goes to the mobile device, triggers alert emails so that everyone knows instantly that there is a problem and it can be fixed.
That takes us to the next slide — “Would a handheld mobile device help you improve maintenance performance and manage your work flow?” Let’s go ahead and take a minute here just to fill in your results. Now, we’ll skip to the results. Again, it looks like everyone thinks that their mobile is a good idea and so we will cover that when I flip over to the actual MicroMain program just to show you how that might work for you. As I mentioned just a few minutes ago or really almost seconds ago, one of the other components of a maintenance software is the ability for not only people out in the facility in the office space and all to ping you that, “It’s too hot in my office” or “We have a problem.” But in manufacturing quite often you might have machine operators. There’s a kiosk, so to speak, with a PC where they can go in or they can even this on a handheld, and they could open up a work request and they can instantly fill it out and send a request to MicroMain.
The nice thing about the request module — automatically triggers an alert email to whoever you want. You can set up multiple people who get email alerts and puts this work request into the MicroMain system. It also is available immediately on a handheld. If I’m out and about, and I get an email that says, “Hey, we just got a new work request. This machine is down.” I’m out there, I grab it. It’s on my handheld, I can take care of business right there. I don’t have to go back in to the office or back to where whoever the maintenance manager is managing things. You can actually have it set up so that person does it right there on the fly. Our web request. What’s called now work request and ours is unlimited number of users. They can send requests, and the only other thing they can do is monitor the status of those requests. So again, that streamlines your whole operation. Instead of people calling you and emailing and having to reenter that data, it’s automatically in there.
Now, we have, as I mentioned, work orders as well on the mobile. You can do all your work orders and all of your PMs. As I mentioned, they’re instantly displayed on your device. A text can pick up, assign, unassign work orders or you may want to set up. If you’re managing everything you may only want them to see things assigned to them. There’s a number of different settings so they can see everything or they can see only theirs, but the bottom line — they’ve got it immediately, they can react immediately. It decreases time to take care of things. Downtime of your equipment is shorter, and things get up and running. Production is back up and running quicker.
When you’re out there with a mobile device, by the way, as I mentioned, and I will show you. You can record meter readings so you can update the meter. You can perform inspections. You might want to go out and you have a number of things that they’re supposed to do on this PM. They could go out and they could take a measurement or even if it’s a work order, you might want them to have a reading for pressure or temperature or whatever. They can go in and put those in, and you actually run reports or graphs on those readings, and you can pass some fail things.
You can also add parts right there on the mobile, and it takes them out of your inventory and keeps inventory up to date. They can create work orders on the fly. They can modify and close out the work orders and record their time. Even if there’s one or more people, you can assign multiple labor, and everyone can close it out on their handheld. I’ll show you, you can do some filtering as well to find things more easily.
For a work order. Every work order, you have the ability to put on your parts. A total parts inventory of all your costs, everything that has been assigned to work orders and PMs, set up min/max reorder amounts. It triggers alerts if you get below minimum to make sure you’ll always have parts on hand. You can track all of your labor so you can put on who is going to do the work. Do you need a certain trade certification, maybe a shop or skill? All of that is available, and you can track the labor hours and costs. You can set up inspection points, which I’ll show you again, but that’s a way to just set up all the tasks that you want done on a PM and actually go in and pass and fail these, create maintenance, corrective maintenance work orders if you fail them, and actually put in readings and measurements that you can actually track.
You can also attach a document to any work order or a PM, by the way. So you might have recommended procedures from the manufacturer that can be attached, either written on a printed work order or on a handheld. And of course, every work order or PM is assigned to an asset. When you do work to an asset, then you have a maintenance history for that piece of equipment. That allows you to keep track of everything ever done, total cost of ownership for that piece of equipment. You can set up asset groups; maybe you have a bunch of injection molding machines. You can run a history for specific machine or just as a group. You may want to be able to say, “I want to see the work order history. What are we spending on injection molding machines?” All of those types of things are available as long as you’re filing in all those types of information.
We talked about downtime, minimizing downtime. One way to minimize downtime is obviously to keep doing scheduled maintenance so that you’re catching things before you have breakdowns. The other, of course, people forget about is having the required inventory on hand. It’s important to monitor your parts inventory to make sure that you have those parts available to you when the PMs are scheduled or when a work order is, when you have a work order. Nothing worse than having a PM scheduled, and the guys go out to do it, and they know they’re going to have to bring some sort of a belt or this, that or the other. They go out, they don’t have them. They are not in inventory. In MicroMain program, you can pre-assign parts to PMs, you can track all run reports to see parts needed for open work orders and PMs. You can set up min/max and reorder amounts since that will trigger an alert to get below min, and you can also create POs to reorder parts and as an alert if that PO is past due. You can always make sure that you have the necessary parts when you need them. That minimizes the downtime and the equipment as well.
I think this might be the last question here: “What is your primary focus? What is causing you to look for maintenance software? Is it primarily preventive maintenance or do you just want to a way to track all your work orders?” It’s probably a little bit of both, but we’ll skip to the results here. As I suspected, people want to be able to do both.
I was talking about parts. Again, MicroMain will allow you to streamline your count. You make sure you have all the parts necessary for your work orders and PMs. We have a pocket PC module called “Inventory”, and that allows you to actually do a parts count by scanning. So you barcode all of your parts, and using the MicroMain inventory for pocket PC — another module — you can actually go out. Instead of a clipboard with a piece of paper, this is basically electronic clipboard. It allows you to go out, scan the part, put in the count. Scan the next part, put in that count, update it to the MicroMain database and update your actual count versus what you said you had in the database. Of course, you can print variance reports so that your inventory is always up to date.
Obviously, you can reduce your inventory cost by analyzing parts or reports for your active parts, what has been used, your parts use frequency, and also your obsolete or inactive parts. No sense in carrying those in inventory if you’re not using them. You know what parts are active, whether that’s what you’re using all the time. You want to make sure you have those stores or those parts on up to date and available, and it keeps your uses of parts at a minimum, and the cost at a minimum.
Again, more on inventory and also asset tracking. You can track everything that happens in inventory as well as everything that happens within asset. You can track asset moves, you can track asset cost. You can also track all of your inventory logs. There’s an inventory log that shows you everything that has happened to any part — when it was purchased, how it was issued, which work order it went to, what your counts are. Again, everything in and out is tracked. Again, total parts in inventory tracking in the MicroMain program. Again, you can capture that asset data and wirelessly sync with the maintenance database. Again, I’m using them on work orders and PMs. I’m instantly taking them out of the inventory. And that keeps your parts and helps ensure that you have what you need.
We had a customer who I’d just let you read the slide but basically they’re a track manufacture for major, large HVAC systems, and they were using MicroMain. They were able to reduce their maintenance cost by 52% and overtime by 48%, because they were scheduling work orders and resources according to when people are available, and also cutting down on overtime and everything else. More work is completed with 42% less manpower. There are numerous reports out there about the savings by implementing a CMMS but you’re basically going to extend your asset life, reduce your parts usage, reduce your overall maintenance cost, reduce downtime, and reduce your labor cost.
To summarize before I get into showing you a little bit of the MicroMain program, your benefit of implementing a maintenance software package, maintain that asset history and information. At a glance you can see everything you’ve ever done and spent on a piece of equipment. You can run reports. How many work orders did we do for that piece of equipment? How many times did it fail because of corrosion or because of you make your own failure codes. You’re going to save money by reducing your maintenance costs and downtime.
Again, by keeping schedule PMs, by making sure your parts are available when you need them. You’re going to reduce all your maintenance cost and your downtime, and increase that labor efficiency, improve that asset lifespan. You’re going to be able to manage your parts inventory. Hopefully, be able to manage that labor. You’ll be able to make sure that if you need an electrician, you have them for various jobs. You have them scheduled appropriately during the week, utility consumption. If it’s not a utility program, you can help improve your utility consumption by making sure everything is up and running correctly. Of course, in the manufacturing world, reducing downtime is major.
I want to just briefly go over to the actual MicroMain program as well. So I’m going to just bear with me just a moment while I share my desktop and bring up the MicroMain system here. So this is the MicroMain main page where all the work is done. We were talking about work orders and PMs, so I’m going to start. This is where everything is managed where you can see everything going on, every work order. The status, is it requested, is it open, is it on hold, are they completed? You can make your own sub statuses; are they on hold or are there parts on order, so on and so forth?
You make your own types; is it a PM, is it a work order? Assign your own priorities, estimate how long it should take; start and due dates, brief descriptions. For instance, when I have highlighted, that is a work order. Maybe this one here if you look at, it’s a “Weekly injection molding machine inspection”. Everything is here together, what you’re working on, which building it’s in, which property. In this case, maybe I have plant one and plant two. Maybe I’m managing a few plants. Maybe each plant has multiple buildings, and then which piece of equipment or asset am I working on.
These are all filters. So again, as we are talking on making things easy to use, this is the way you can filter quickly and find things. So if I just wanted to see only my PMs, I can say, “I just want to see my PMs,” and apply filters. These are all my PMs and then possibly I just want to see what’s requested that I need to issue and give to people, and there they are. So it’s an easy way to manage things to get into the actual work orders and PMs. You just click on the number and it opens them up, and you can actually then apply your parts and your labor and other costs.
This whole page here gets populated by either work orders coming in via that work request module which I mentioned, which the work request module allows people to log in. It gives them a simple form which you can have prefilled based on login, and they simply would pick what machine it is or where they are. If it’s an office space, what the problem is. I have a machine overheating; they can put in a brief description, hit submit request and that instantly sends email alerts to various people depending on how you set things up. But in that work order, though, is in the MicroMain program and here it is. Let me just take out my filters, and that request is instantly here in the MicroMain program. So that’s a work order instantly here in the program and that request, as I mentioned, many things that you can do to it. Here is the actual work. In this case, a work order tells who it came from, tells you the sources of the work request. I can assign labor parts and other costs. Their description of the problem is here.
Now, as I mentioned, you can also manage this on handheld. This particular one, I have my handheld set up. In this case, I’m just using an emulator for an iPad, but I’ve got a setup as if I’m Tim and I can see everything assigned to me which is the little guy with his arm up and is assigned to me. But I can also see unassigned. So if I was out in the field and I got an email alert that said, “Hey, this new work request came in,” I can instantly open it up and take care of the work. Pretty much all the functionality and I can put on my labor, I can time in and out. I can put on parts. I can either put them on manually or scan them. I can also do inspection points, update meters, put on other cost, maybe I had to rent a piece of equipment. I can look at attached documents or I might want to take a picture before and after, and attach it. I can change the status, put on details, the comments. A lot of functionality as well as if I click on this live link, it takes me to that piece of equipment where I can see a lot of information about that piece of equipment.
Again, the flow if it’s a work order or a work request, it can come from the requesters into the MicroMain program, and it could be done here. It could be issued and printed. It could also be emailed directly to a vendor possibly. So you can email this to one of your vendors or your people could do it on a handheld.
Again, as we’re talking about, that cuts down the time. Someone is not calling you, they’re not emailing you, then you have to go in and input it yourself. It’s automatically not only here but simultaneously on that handheld; cuts down the time involved in reacting to a requested work order. And everything that’s done on this handheld, instantly posted to the MicroMain program as well as back on the rent, these people who requested it…notice they get a message, by the way, that lets them know that it has been requested and all. They can click here. They can see the status. They can see if it’s complete. They can see any message you may have written, plus they get an email when it’s completed, so they have two alerts.
Let’s go back into the MicroMain program. If you’re setting up all your PMs, as I mentioned, you can set up all of these PMs here, and it’s basically very simple. MicroMain’s simplicity is king, and it’s nice to have a lot of functionality, but at the end of the day you want to make sure that it’s usable and easy to use and everything we do is bent on ease of use. But again, with an eye towards manufacturing, set up your PMs and name it. You want to assign a priority possibly, and estimate how long it should take. Are there any lock out tag out safety issues? If so, check these alert boxes and you can put the document on or just put them in the description.
We support all the frequencies whether it’s daily, is it weekly, Monday, Wednesday, Friday? Possibly it’s monthly or every three months or six months. If it’s quarterly or semiannual, annually, every five years, or again, maybe meter based. Maybe it’s every 1,000 hours of run time. If it’s meter based, we don’t read the equipment from whatever software you’re using. So you would set up, in this case, some sort of a weekly possibly meter read; that’s the easiest way to do it just as a reminder to go out and read the meters. And then you can print this. If I click that, it shows me all of my equipment that has a meter on it, and I can update all the meters in the system using that.
Again, you set up all your PMs whether they’re weekly, quarterly, semiannual, and there are numerous ways to put the instructions on. But once I set this up, I name it. I can put my job plan in here. If I want it, or I could attach a document or I can set up an inspection telling him everything I want him to look at. And not only what I want him to look at, but what the perimeters are. For instance, I want him to take a cycle count. It should be 10 seconds. I want him to check the gate. Here is what they’re looking for.
Doing these inspections, you can pass and fail these to create corrective maintenance work orders on field inspections. As well as if I’m put in readings, I can track all these readings and run reports or graphs of those readings, maybe identify trend lines. All that’s important is especially in manufacturing to making sure that you’re tracking not only the PMs but all the corrective maintenance, and it’s all in one place. You can set up one PM with all of your instructions, and if I’m going to do the same thing to all three machines, put them all on here. It will create a separate PM work order for each one so you can maintain separate work order histories. So again, it’s easy to use. Set it up one time, put all your instructions on and then assign it to these, and it will track each and every one and create separate PM work orders. And if you want, you can pre-assign labor. You can preassign parts and tell it what parts to use as well and even what tools that you want.
Again, you’re talking about minimizing time. You don’t want guys going out to the site, going to work on it, and they forgot that they need a certain kind of screwdriver or they forget the ladder or whatever it might be. You can have those on here and pre-assign. When it schedules, it will automatically be on the work, the PM. So again, once you set these up, they end up in the MicroMain work order page where you can then go in and take care of each one of these, either here with the written work order or emailed or again they can be done on the handheld and all the functionalities available including doing inspections, putting in the readings, passing and failing, and creating corrective maintenance work orders. All with an eye towards streamlining everything and being able to track everything.
I’d mentioned briefly and I’ll just show you. We have the ability to manage resources. I don’t know if I have enough data in this little sample database to illustrate it, but we have a week at a glance scheduler where I would look at my work orders and PMs, and I can filter first and maybe I only want to see my PMs, I can filter it. But essentially I would look over here and say, “Here is something that hasn’t been in…this is just a work order.” But I can come over here and say, “I’m going to drag it to whoever is available on this day,” and I could drag it to that person. And if I had the information in here correctly, it would update for that person how many work orders and PMs they have and what their estimated time is.
You know instantly what your resources are, what your availability is. If they’re not available, they’re highlighted or they’re not on here. If they’re overbooked, they’re highlighted. If they have an eight-hour day and you’re trying to assign something to them, they’re still there, still available but it alerts you that you’re about to try to assign a work order to someone who already has eight hours assigned. That way you reduce your overtime. You might want to reassign it to someone else, which by the way, speaking about reassigning, one has this work order. If I want to give it to someone else or change days, I can simply drag and drop it to a different person.
So again, resource planning and allocation is paramount in reducing your overtime and also making sure you have the proper resources for the job at hand. This all of course culminates in reporting, and I know we’re here at the end of the time but MicroMain has roughly 600 reports that come with it; anything from looking at your completed work order cost summaries for a particular building by group, by department, by particular asset. All of that information available — asset downtimes, and histories, and depreciation, replacement projections, all of those types of things. Labor, if you’re big on tracking all of your labor. How many they’re doing on time versus the late or maybe you’re always estimating it’s going to take this amount of time. In their actual time, it’s always more. You can track that if someone is taking long than others.
All those types of reports and graphs are available; batch reports as well. Also, of course, in the program you can track with a couple of clicks; very simple in MicroMain. If I go in to any work order or any PM I’m working on and I can do this on the handheld as well, but I can go and go straight to this machine with one click. And then, from that machine I can go straight to the history with two clicks. The history of any piece of equipment is always two clicks away, just about anywhere you are in the program. I can see every work order and PM, what my total costs are, and I can actually go in and click on these and see these if I needed more information.
So again, when we’re talking about applying a maintenance software package in the manufacturing industry, it allows you to put in all of your equipment, all of the information, all the documents needed, all the documentation, warranty information, inspections, and track all of your downtime to make sure that you have the proper parts. It’s all about keeping things up and running smoothly, and production up and running. Thank you very much. There is a recording of this which will be sent to you, by the way. If you have questions, feel free to give us a call.
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