It isn’t your Mother’s CMMS – Facility Systems have come a long way

It isn’t your mother’s CMMS. These days, CMMS isn’t simply a computerized maintenance management system meant to replace a paper based planning and work order system.

Modern systems include both preventive and corrective / demand based maintenance and requests received from occupants on a variety of maintenance and service issues. They are flexible, adaptable, easy to use and usually web based with systems available for small to large portfolios.

It’s critical for effective Facility Management for a variety of reasons.

First, it enables you to plan, issue and track completion of planned preventive maintenance activities.

Second, it provides tracking and evidence of completing legislative requirements, ensuring compliance, and demonstrating due-diligence.

Third, it records new maintenance requirements and related costs that come from your technicians and contractors who identify issues after their preventive maintenance and inspection activities.

Fourth, it records, initiates and tracks requests from occupants.

While the ease of managing preventive maintenance is useful and the ability to track legislative compliance is great, tracking corrective repair work, including occupant requests, provides you with data you can analyze and turn into information you use to make decisions that reduce costs, improve services and manage your suppliers better.

By using this information and analyzing it with simple tools such as Excel pivot tables, you can pinpoint trends and develop strategies for your facilities and buildings. Track lamp replacement to identify when a re-lamping exercise will be cost effective, compare work order costs by vendor or service to see where synergies or new contracts are can save money, compare in-house work with subcontracted work to ensure limited overlap and that contractors are doing what is in their contract, identify call-backs on equipment to assess supplier quality or indicate replacement of equipment to reduce maintenance costs.

Information is the most powerful tool you have. You can use it to justify your business cases and your initiatives as well as demonstrating the value your Facility Management or Operations department provides to the corporation.

It all starts with a CMMS system. If you don’t have one, or if you aren’t using yours to its full advantage, it’s time to make the move and strategically improve results.