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Most maintenance teams invest in a CMMS software yet the outcomes of these software fail to live up to the pre-investment ROI calculations. 

Quite often the blame is on the software, very few teams realise that successful maintenance management requires good data collection and analyses. CMMS Software is just a part processor of good data, not the solution itself. 

This knowledge article is written for maintenance teams who are looking to improve the outcome of their CMMS Systems by 10% to 20 percent by adopting good data principles.

Step:1 Take an objective yet maintenance performance-oriented view of your maintenance data. 

Managers first have to give the current affair of their CMMS an impartial look in order to know the next course of actions they may need. Some items to look at during the assessment are the following:

• Maintenance organization - know how efficient your workforce is by reviewing the estimated hours versus actual hours the crew has spent on each work order. Actual hours should fall within 15% of the estimated hours. Moreover, identify the type of work the team is achieving by summing up the man-hours grouped by work type or class. This ensures that true maintenance work is done in support of production targets and goals.
•  Preventive maintenance procedures - check out the total hours worked of the employee, categorized by work class, and compare the number of breakdown repairs to the number of PM work done. You would know if technicians execute PM tasks at the right frequency if a decline in emergency repairs is seen during analysis.
•  Preventive maintenance inspection frequencies - executing a PM task six times should lead to at least one corrective work order is the ideal scenario of a true maintenance. Managers should check out the amount of scheduled work order classified by work class and analyze the amount of work known thru PM inspection and see if the ratio is 1:6. 
• Maintenance costs - know where cost accumulate by summing up cost for each work type and comparing the work request by equipment type, including both closed and open work orders. The total cost to the maintenance includes contractor cost, parts and material cost, and labour cost. Technicians should also know where to focus their limited resources.
• Work backlog - check the ready backlogs (i.e. all materials are available waiting for scheduling) of work. Ready backlogs should be no more than four weeks and total backlog only four to six weeks.

Step:2: Prioritise your maintenance data issues. Use different capabilities of your CMMS system to find a good-fit solution for your data issues.

Upon assessment, managers may realize that the data gathered in their CMMS is unavailable or inaccurate. Listed below are CMMS modules and the ideal information they should contain in order to help managers in the process of re-implementation.

• Equipment module - must contain all important data for each equipment such as identification number, description, location, equipment type, department, warranty information, and cost centre among others.
• Work order module - different work types and classes have to be timely reviewed by managers to check if they are quickly known and recognized.
• Preventive maintenance or tasks module - should contain a comprehensive guide of maintenance activities. Tasks must include all tools and materials used, safety precautions conducted, job steps, and the estimated time of completion. When tasks are closed out, feedback and lessons learned should be provided by technicians for future productivity improvements. 
• Inventory module - need to have accepted maximum and minimum numbers of spare parts on each item to ensure that all needed parts are readily available. The inputted data has the same requirements with the equipment module (e.g. identification number, description, type, etc.) and should indicate the exact location of the item in the storeroom.
• Labour module - should contain all the skills allocated to the department and with labour rates specified per craft or individual to tabulate accurate costs. The data in this module should be used to assist the CMMS’s planning and scheduling function. 
• Look-up tables and drop-down lists - must be concise and not overpopulated. Review and limit the choices to no more than 10 items as too many items can be subject to different interpretations.

Step 3: Take a CMMS Value Test. Work on the high impact and low score areas. 

The following questions will decide whether you are receiving value from your CMMS or not. Give a five (5) to your CMMS implementation if it is a perfect fit and zero (0) if otherwise. Summed up scores that are less than 65 may be an indication that one is jumping from crisis to crisis without solving the more important issues of reliability and quality. 

Here are the concrete steps you may take in order to increase CMMS value:

1. Decide what you want to get out of the system.
2. Confirm that the system can deliver what you want.
3. Understand what you are currently doing with the system.
4. Do a gap analysis between current and target.
5. Itemize tasks to be done to close the gap.
6. Prioritize tasks based on both payback and cost and difficulty of implementing.
7. Plan the tasks in detail – what has to be done, by when, and by whom.
8. Use the CMMS work order process to issue and execute the tasks.
9. Install a simple progress tracking process – both for the tasks and the resulting improvements.
10. Be consistent!

In closing, your maintenance management goals require people, systems and management to work in sync. If any one of them are misaligned, then take the corrective action at the earliest.

Written by Prasanna Kulkarni, Founder and Product Architect of Comparesoft.