Do you like formulas? I do. So sometimes I create them and here's my formula for the steps you need to take in order to realistically even begin to put a CMMS to service at your company. Before I start though, let's get the disclaimer out of the way. First, I hate the title of this article but research shows that clickbait pays off - regardless, I sincerely hope I can help you. Second, the steps we will talk about are designed to start internal conversations, which is the same as saying that this formula's outcome is more probabilistic than deterministic. These are some practical, common-sense steps listed and described so that you’re "pushed" into action rather than succumbing to analysis paralysis so common in these matters. Let's just get started:
This is a short and fast list at this point in the process, do not spend too much time on it, you’re looking for the major components only. The idea is to not be bogged down on the small things. It's better to take optimized care of less items than do nothing on many items. You catch my drift.
Here you're looking for the number of technicians, internal or external (contractors), that actively would jump into action if you needed to recover from a failure. Include also the technicians that go around inspecting the equipment for possible issues (if that's the operator you may divide the number by two). This gives you an idea of the organizational complexity you have to deal with so you can later gauge other aspects.
Conveniently you got the necessary information for the following step in the points above. It's like I knew what was coming, amazing.
As a rule of thumb, if your company has:
Then I'd say you need some kind of CMMS solution. The more of the above you have, the more complex (read powerful) the maintenance management solution will probably need to be.
If you do not need a CMMS, implement a simple scheduler using Outlook or similar and log your actions and spare consumption with a spreadsheet like Excel. There's really no need for more than that - your operations are just too small for added tools. Of course, you may find some simpler applications in the market that deal with less complexity but usually desktop tools are more than enough. Up to you to decide.
Now, because this is an article about the use of CMMS, we assume you require one such solution so we now continue with the remaining steps:
Keep it simple, we're looking for major subcomponents only. The more important items that make a full system up. One example could be:
Environment Control – HVAC – Unit 5 – Compressor – Thermal expansion valve 1
You can use techniques like RCM but, in most cases - especially if you're small and just starting, a common sense yet methodic analysis will suffice. You can easily improve on something that already works at a later stage.
For example, consider the HVAC example once more: it's a critical system (hey, gotta stay cool!), so the maintenance department needs to implement all efforts to ensure it will not fail. So minimal inspection contents and intervals could be as follows (apologies, I'm not a HVAC technician so don’t focus on the details of my horrible example):
CMMS tools will usually include scheduled checklists or inspection routes so you see where we're going - we're slowly getting the CMMS contents ready. Once this is complete, we can move on to step 5.
You've compiled everything and you're ready to go. Here are steps inside a major step. I think these are called sub-steps but let's not get too technical.
So, yes, you will make some mistakes but you only can tell after you have implemented something. As time goes by, you will obviously have to improve on your implementation but, from experience, this comes almost naturally - technicians will, for example, complain about the frequency of checks and the number of notes they need to take, so that procedure and all others need to be review, adjusted, deleted and optimized.
If budgets allows and if it is technically feasible, consider going automatic and have equipment report its status. Generally speaking, operational information may be extracted from the DCS or SCADA systems or by installing sensors on to the equipment itself. The rules of failure (at least warning) need to be programmed in but nowadays it is more than feasible to have readings going through to complex rules in order to determine a failure condition even if transient. Of course, you can further extend these ideas to include AI and ML and thus get more powerful results that may dramatically lower your costs and equipment down time.
I hope this article makes you and your team think about these concepts. A CMMS is well within reach of almost any organization, it just needs to be properly used.
Keep coming back for more as I write about technical tools and concepts that work together to make equipment maintenance more efficient. Remember to checkout our blog for more.