A day in your maintenance department - comma CMMS as workflow improvement enabler.

Published 2023-12-23 by Diego Santos (a 7.4 minute read) | Back to the main page

Introduction

This is an imaginary but rather common sequence of daily events for a maintenance department. Our goal is to highlight the many moments at which comma CMMS contributes to more effective and efficient maintenance workflows and, at the same time, guide you in a practical way to assess the use of our tool on your own (probably mostly similar) operations. So, without further ado, let's start the day!

Operations and maintenance daily meeting

As the technicians put on their uniforms and gather their tools, operations and maintenance management discuss the list of jobs for the day. The work priorities are assessed and agreed upon and there's a discussion about a special situation that has happened during the overnight shift where one of the redundant water pumps tripped and was put back in service without a clear reason for the trip having been found. For that, the automatically generated report that is generated at 745am (giving enough time for the night shift to update their findings) is used as a starting point for the meeting. All involved can clearly see the highest priority jobs and can also see the actions and preliminary investigation performed by the night shift to recover the pump. The exchange of information happens through comma CMMS as all involved will input relevant data directly and that allows for the technical management to make informed decisions and decide that the investigation of the pump issues has to be carried out today.

The morning

Because jobs are assigned through work orders as the work is discussed on the operations meeting, most of the maintenance technicians have seen no change to the job they are performing, so they do not need to wait for the morning maintenance meeting to end and, at this time, they are already on site.

Of note is also the routine scheduled work performed by some of the technicians that are auto-assigned work orders containing check lists for daily inspections. Those technicians are also already on the field and can quickly generate work requests for items found to be out of boundaries as they fill in their inspection check lists. One of those orders is given priority 1 by the technician which causes the foreman to receive a notification and assign the work to another team. Upon inspection, the issue is not as urgent as initially thought, and the work order is given a new lower priority which means it will not have to be dealt with today. All of those steps of the workflow are recorded on the work order for later analysis, if required.

The only thing left to do in the maintenance department is to rearrange a couple of teams a little so that that the technicians most familiar with the water pumps are now re-routed to that new high-priority job. That requires that a new team is given their previous work.

The handover of work is very smooth since the list of actions already taken have been marked as complete on the task list that is linked to the work order for the original team. A quick glance to the recommended tools informs that new team that a special tool will be required to perform one of the steps. Before leaving for the job, the team ensures they have the required tools to perform their work avoiding unnecessary delays coming back and forth from site.

The team assigned to the water pump quickly examines the description left by their night-shift colleagues on the work order using their service mobile phone and consult the Functional Location details of the pump to confirm a few items, namely if indeed the pump pdf manuals are available and linked to the functional location (they are) and what jobs have recently been done on the pump. They find that a new filter has been installed just the week before. Still on the functional locations details area, they find the filter is a new model, that has never been used before. They also now know who performed that filter replacement job in case some clarifications are required. Perhaps the issue is related to that.

The afternoon

The team on the water pump discovers that indeed the new filter was not installed properly has the task list used is the one for the old type of filter. A request is made for the task list to be adjusted to include an extra step to account for the differences between the types of filters - this request is logged as a new work order assigned to the maintenance manager which will then reassign it to the admin person. That is an example of a work order being used to log job requests that are not necessarily on-the-field jobs but rather administrative in nature.

All teams log the work done and set the status of work orders to the current status. Some work orders are waiting for material to arrive and a many are set as complete.

End of day

Just before leaving, the day foreman browses through the list of work that has been set as complete and batch closes all of those orders. During the day, some work orders are tagged as "night" which means that those are to be tackled by the night shift in case nothing major happens during the night. A simple search on the work order console for the "night" tag provides a quick list of work to be done.

Conclusion

It is the ability to record and recall all of the information that is a game changer in utilizing comma CMMS in maintenance management. As much as possible (yet not excessively) most professional interactions are to be had through the system, incentivizing all involved to do so. The immediate benefit is the construction of a company-owned knowledge base repository that grows with the company and can be used by all in whatever level they happen to be. It is a way to distribute the input of data through many all at the same time keeping that data tidy and organized for current and future maintenance staff.