Tracking maintenance costs in comma CMMS

Published 2020-03-19 by Rui J Alves (a 7.1 minute read) | Back to the main page

comma CMMS (https://commacmm.com) provides you with the ability to track maintenance costs arising from both manpower and equipment usage. In this article we will go through the parameters and procedures that need to be set in order to properly setup the system to track these costs.

Setup general information

1. On the top menu bar go to “your username” and then “Modules”. Click “Organization/ Plant/ Department”.

2. Click “Edit plant” and then select the plant name from the dropdown. Ensure that the currency is set correctly.

3. On this same page, click “Plant hourly rates” from the menu on the left and ensure your plant is still selected on the dropdown menu. You can add your hourly rate names. For example, you can have “default” and “OT” rates.

Setup manpower information

1. On the top menu bar go to “your username” and then “Modules”. Click “Organization/ Plant/ Department”.
2. Click “Users” and then click “Edit active users”. Select the first active user on the list and let the information load. You will need the hourly rates as you defined above (Default and OT) for each user.
3. Fill in your rates and click Save.

4. Repeat for each of your users that performs maintenance tasks.

Setup equipment costs

1. Go to the equipment module by clicking “Assets” and the “Equipment and tools”. You will have to add the cost to each item if you have not entered that information when the item was created.
2. For this, click the item ID on the search results table and then click the “Edit…” button at the top right after the item properties page opens.

3. Go to the financial tab and enter the unit price for the item and click save.

4. Repeat for each consumable and not consumable (containers do not have cost as they are simply groups of non-consumable items). If you need to edit the cost of many items, you will notice that the search console tab on your browser is not closed after the new one opens so use that to your advantage by editing the item and then closing the tab and repeating for the next one. comma CMMS also provides services for data upload/ migration/ updates – contact us for details.
5. All information required is now ready. From now on everything revolves around work orders so there must be a way of adding your manpower and equipment costs on each job that is performed. We will look at that now.

Cost information on work orders

1. Open a work order from the work order search console (“top menu bar”, “Maintenance”, “Work orders”).
2. First add your equipment by clicking on the “Equipment” tab and then on the “Add equipment” link.
3. Fill in the form to add the equipment to the work order, in our example (see picture) we added 2 pieces equipment with ID number 2.

4. Click on save to make the changes permanent (we are doing this step-by-step but later you can do all the changes to the work order and add all the equipment in one go and click the save button only once).
5. Go back to the current work order and you can confirm the item was added to the usage list of that work order.

6. Now let’s add some manpower information. Click the tasks tab and then the “Add or edit tasks” link. You can import existing task lists that you created on the task list module or you can create custom task lists just for this work order. You can be very specific and describe step-by-step each task required to do the job and even what type of expertise is a task step for (you can get costs per job type this way too like how much e.g. electricians are costing you) but for the purpose of this tutorial, lets assume you are only interested on general costs, so enter only the time it took for each user to do their part (if all users have the same hourly rate, you can add up all that under the same username). On our example we have added 5 hours at the default rate and 1 hour at the OT rate. For each rate ignore all other information and enter only the time and click on the “+” button to add it to the list, do not click on the “save” button until you are done.

Note: to know the rate set for each task line, hover the mouse button over the clock image.

7. Click save to save the work order.
8. Lets go back to check if the costs for this job now show up on the work order so click ‘Back to current work order’ after you save it (or open the work order from the search console) and click on the “Costs” tab. You will see two columns, one for labor costs and one for equipment costs. The total labor cost is $70 (5h x $10 default rate + 1h x $20 OT rate). In the example, we only used consumables at a total cost of $200. The total job cost was therefore $270.

Cost reports

To analyze our cost records over a certain period, we will make use of the stats and reports area of comma CMMS.

1. On the top menu bar, click on “Stats” and then on “+Report”.
2. On the system reports section, the reports that are related to costs are currently the following:
   1. Hours, users and rates – provides the total hours per pay rate, the percentage of each pay rate and the total number of hours per pay rate per user.
   2. Hours and job types – provides the same information as above but in cost amount.
   3. Labor cost analysis – provides the total number of hours logged per trade/ expertise.
3. On the “Create report now” row select the time period to analyze, click “Create” and the system will generate the analysis charts for your analysis.

Final note

At this moment (March 2020) it is not yet possible to get a consolidated report with information about the total cost of maintenance for your selected period. That would be the total cost of labor plus the total cost of equipment as collected on each work order. This report will be provided on the next release and may already be available by the time you read this.