Maintenance management software provides a combined digital solution that connects, manages, and controls the state of all assets within the facility – all within one platform. By integrating asset management tools, maintenance teams can be more productive while improving performance, ensuring safety and compliance, and minimizing unplanned downtime while saving money.
Like many industries, there is no denying that field service management has been going through a digital revolution over the past couple of years. For an industry that keeps modernizing due to new equipment, the integration of new changes never seems to stop. Today, we will be focusing on maintenance management software, a tool that can help you and your team ease that transition and embrace the digital age of FSM.
While technicians remain at the heart and soul of the field service industry, maintenance management software programs help maintenance teams complete tasks a lot more efficiently than ever before, and most importantly – catch critical errors to reduce repair costs, maximize uptime, and increase customer satisfaction.
Let’s break down maintenance management software and how it can help you improve your maintenance operations.
What does maintenance management software do?
A computerized maintenance management software (CMMS) is a digital environment that gathers, stores and analyzes all the information and data regarding the maintenance of equipment: vehicles, machinery, communications, plant infrastructures, and other physical assets. These programs also provide valuable insights through data analytics, enabling teams to make informed decisions that further enhance operational efficiency.
As technology continues to evolve, new advancements keep giving maintenance teams new predictive capabilities and accurate tracking through automation, removing the need for constant tracking and transforming the field service industry via lowered maintenance costs.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits we can get from computerized maintenance management systems.
Asset tracking
In modern facilities or work sites, we have many people interacting with a specific piece of equipment, and there are so many machines! For example, when working with an expensive tractor, you will have different people driving and cleaning it, and maintenance professionals responsible for it being properly serviced and looked after.
Maintenance operations run a lot smoother when there is a centralized platform for inventory management, providing the necessary information about the tractor: where is it, who was the last driver, when is the next service inspection, and the overall state of machines thanks to sensors. It’s not hard to imagine the chaos if all of this information was manually stored. A preventative maintenance program allows clear visibility to everyone with a few clicks.
Maintenance management software fosters better communication and collaboration among team members by providing a centralized platform for information sharing. This ensures that everyone is on the same page, reducing misunderstandings, improving team productivity, and maximizing uptime for machines through digitized asset performance management.
With maintenance management software, tracking the location and usage of equipment becomes a breeze. This not only helps in preventing loss or misuse but also ensures that maintenance schedules are adhered to, thereby extending the lifespan of the assets. It provides real-time updates and alerts, ensuring that any issues are addressed promptly. This proactive approach minimizes downtime and keeps operations running smoothly, ultimately leading to increased productivity and cost savings.
Workflow clarity
Maintenance managers are well aware that there are a lot of moving parts in their everyday business operations. From delivering scheduled tasks, updating them with new information, to dealing with new maintenance requests, and inventory management, their plate is full.
Amidst all this chaos they need to create clear, visible workflows to ensure they are not missing anything and that technicians are updated with new information in real-time. Maintenance management software provides easy-to-use dashboards the visualize workflows, simplifying day-to-day operations.
Think of maintenance management software as your command center, where every update and task flows seamlessly to your team. It eliminates the chaos of scattered communication, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and can respond swiftly to any changes.
It’s empowering to have dashboard that not only shows you the current state of your operations but also predicts future trends. Maintenance software provides real-time knowledge what you can act on immediately, allowing you to anticipate issues and allocate resources more effectively, transforming data into a powerful tool for strategic planning and operational excellence.
Benefiting from Digital Automation
With the help of maintenance software, inventory management tasks get full oversight from field technicians and inventory managers. Instead of drowning them in manual labor, maintenance management platform automates tasks and maximizes maintenance efficiency, practically eliminating unplanned downtime and helps you increase asset performance.
Tasks such as ordering parts, repair jobs, resource planning, replenishing MRO inventory, scheduling shifts, and other maintenance activities help managers save time, eliminate errors, improve productivity, shifting focus towards maximizing preventive maintenance rather than spending time on manual administration tasks.
CMMS software collects all the valuable data for record keeping, which helps equipment managers automate preventive maintenance tasks. Updates on spare parts inventory can be fully automated, while bigger breakdowns are handled by scheduling repairs, calculating maintenance costs, and evaluating danger to worker safety if broken down equipment is not fixed.
By instantly informing employees about emerging maintenance needs, asset management simplifies so many monotonous tasks that are tedious and leave a ton of space for human error: determining maintenance expenses, asset life cycle, tracking prior maintenance activities and pinpointing equipment reliability based on collected data.
With mobile-friendly asset management software, your technicians can update work orders, access critical information, and communicate with the team in real-time, even when they’re out in the field, ensuring that no task falls through the cracks and that your maintenance operations run like clockwork.
Managing mobile workforce
As mentioned before, maintenance management is one of many field service management aspects an operations manager needs to worry about. One of the toughest challenges is balancing the management of internal and external resources. When we say resources, we refer to both technicians and physical assets.
A CMMS software comes in the form of a mobile app on a mobile device, allows the streamlining of processes, and brings outstanding connectivity between management, technicians, and assets. The result is reducing downtime, executing planned tasks on time, and approaching jobs efficiently.
With maintenance management software, managers can track the location and status of both their mobile workforce and proper inventory management in real-time. This feature allows for better coordination, communication, and record keeping, ensuring that technicians are always informed about maintenance metrics for their next task, as well as any changes affecting asset reliability.
CMMS software helps managers optimize technician schedules by attractive attention to the most important factors: management tools, optimal resource allocation, supply chain management, and asset availability. This ensures that the right technician is assigned to the right job, reducing travel time and making everything a lot more efficient without the burden of manual maintenance and asset assignment.
Technicians can access and update work orders directly from their mobile devices using the user friendly asset management software. They can easily view job details, update status, and record important information such as parts used and time spent on each task. This streamlined process eliminates paperwork and reduces the risk of errors, ensuring that all job-related information is accurately captured and easily accessible.
Preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance is one of the biggest benefits afforded by maintenance software. Most manufacturing companies are used to a reactive maintenance approach where asset health will present a problem, a malfunction, or an error, forcing them to react and tend to it.
CMMS software allows managers to create, customize, and schedule preventive maintenance schedules based on the unique requirements of each asset. This ensures that maintenance tasks are performed at the right intervals, reducing the risk of unexpected breakdowns and prolonging the asset lifespan.
Preventive maintenance software can essentially track an asset’s health, gather information, and create alerts before the asset starts underperforming. Not only does it prevent workflow obstruction but it also predicts when the asset will need to be serviced.
Preventive and predictive maintenance can automate maintenance tasks and prolong asset life without increasing control costs. Nothing should be outside your control, and advanced management software can integrate with condition-monitoring sensors to track asset performance in real time. By choosing the right provider, equipment managers can also ensure ongoing support for legacy systems that plant managers, construction workers or technicians may be using before integrating the new system. These features allow managers to ensure a smoother integration while improving the detection of potential issues before they lead to failures, allowing maintenance teams to take proactive measures and avoid costly downtime.
Stored, saved documentation
Especially when working with complex machines and vehicles, equipment specialists cannot effectively ensure asset reliability and apply corrective maintenance tasks without extensive documentation of maintenance history. To effectively manage these processes, managers look at prior work requests, regulatory compliance procedures proof of proper training for workers – any relevant data on asset utilization, as it can shorten equipment lifespan.
Safely storing all this knowledge created by utilizing accounting software creates an invaluable resource bank that everyone can access by using their mobile devices. Maintenance scheduling software does not only help you manage everyday processes and operations but it adds long-term value to your department. It becomes easier to onboard new people, create more informed and accurate key performance indicators as well as share information with other people within the company.
Maintenance management software provides a centralized platform for storing and managing all maintenance-related documentation, including work orders, inspection reports, and compliance records. This approach ensures that all critical information is easily accessible, making it simpler to generate reports and demonstrate compliance with regulatory standards during audits.
Compliance audits
Maintenance management software makes compliance audits much easier by giving you access to tailored reports and numbers. You don’t have to stop working or interrupt your entire workflow to conduct an audit as you now have access to real-time data.
Health and Safety
Preventive maintenance management is also integral to the health and safety of your workforce. Being able to schedule maintenance activities ensures your technicians are always using assets that are not putting their health and safety in doubt.
By ensuring that equipment is well-maintained and functioning properly, a maintenance management system helps minimize the risk of workplace accidents caused by faulty machinery through careful enterprise resource planning. This not only promotes a safer work environment but also reduces the likelihood of costly accidents, injuries, and potential legal issues.
The best maintenance management software
When choosing the best maintenance management software for your organization, consider a solution that offers a user-friendly interface, robust features, and seamless integration with your existing systems. For an effective system that covers maintenance and asset management, you need mobile accessibility, real-time updates on maintenance processes, and customizable reporting to ensure perfect conditions and specific needs for enterprise asset management.
A top-notch maintenance management software should greatly increase productivity among your team members. With features that allow you to gather and analyze crucial maintenance data, a computerized maintenance management system automates routine and preventative maintenance tasks. By investing in a software solution that prioritizes these key aspects, you can ensure that your maintenance operations run smoothly and efficiently, ultimately leading to improved asset performance and customer satisfaction.
Fortunately, Frontu is an all-around field service management solution that can help your maintenance team do their job better by focusing on improvements for maintenance processes instead of drowning in bureaucracy. From heavy equipment to vending management and facility management, Frontu covers a wide array of FSM verticals.
Conclusion
Maintenance management software should be a part of a bigger FSM solution and balance asset management needs with mobile workforce challenges. Frontu is the epitome of these two principles, helping maintenance teams bring clarity to maintenance schedules, facility management, and workforce communication.
