It may be time to rethink your perspective on your company's Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS)

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H
aving worked in
and been around
maintenance,
facilities, and asset
management for almost 30
years, I’ve discovered that the
need for a CMMS still appears
to be in question. In 90 percent
of the instances where a CMMS
is in use, plant manufacturing
leadership appears to want
to have it, but only so far as it
assists with meeting compliance
requirements. All other benefits
seem to be an added annoyance
to this thing they do not
understand and really do not
want because maintenance and
the CMMS – and related staffing
and expense – are “indirect
costs,” which are two of the most
evil words in the manufacturing
world today.
So, is CMMS the devil or an
angel? It is the devil for short-
term operations when it tells
you something you don’t want
to know in the current week,
month, or quarter. For example,
your CMMS might inform you
that you lost manufacturing time
(downtime and/or uptime on
equipment); your maintenance
labor efficiency (time card
hours to maintenance hours
reported on work orders) isn’t
what it should be; the reasons
why you cannot repair your
equipment (ineffective supply
chain management, lack of
labor, lack of knowledge); your
equipment is breaking because
of poor operator training, no PM
program, lack of operator PMs,
or Total Productive Maintenance
(TPM). It is the devil when it
consumes your resources and
does not give leadership the
results they are looking for, and
it is most certainly the devil
when it asks for more resources
to improve or replace people or
equipment. And when leadership
does not listen to the answers,
and goes ahead for the sake of
short-term production needs and
a catastrophic event occurs, it
is surely the devil when it says,
“I told you so but you did not
listen.” All these examples point
to what is wrong. In the short-
term, this reflects on the cadre of
broken business systems in the
overall operating processes and
the need to fix them on the fly.
Broken business systems
All issues of poor performance
come from broken business
systems. When you have strings
of broken business systems
interconnected throughout the
facility, you get the results that
many manufacturers get today:
lots of inefficiencies and waste
resulting in the inability to meet
production output and cost
goals. To fix broken business
systems, you need information
for asset management, which
comes from a CMMS. The CMMS
is the heart and soul of an
Enterprise Asset Management
PHOTO:MONKEYBUSINESSIMAGES
BY GARY BROWN
It might be time to rethink your perspective on
your company’s Computerized Maintenance
Management System (CMMS)
Necessary evil or
angel in disguise?

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(EAM) system. Utilization
of assets will not produce
the desired results without
documented information about
how the assets are performing.
This information comes from
the CMMS through service
history as reported on work
orders. With good service
history, root cause analysis
can obtain a foothold. Looking
at Mean Time to Failure (MTTF)
can tell you where to look for
opportunities to improve.
And these opportunities to
improve point you to the
broken business systems.
With the advent and
prevalence of Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP)
systems and the knowledge
of who makes the decisions
to implement them (the bean
counters), the days of gut feel,
intuition, and experience have
gone out the window. Business
today is totally data driven. If
you don’t have the data, you
cannot back up your requests
for capital, overhaul, or needed
indirect funding for labor or
parts. The data you are looking
for comes from a CMMS; it is
the repository, the keeper of the
service history. The end game is
to have the ability to configure
the CMMS so that data going in
is easily retrievable to produce
the reports you need. The
output from the CMMS – Key
Performance Indicators (KPIs)
– should be tailored to report
on both the external impact on
manufacturing activities and the
internal function of the asset
management team, which is the
maintenance and facilities effort.
These KPIs once again point to
broken business systems. The
ones that are giving you the most
CONTINUED ON PAGE 44

3. IDC INDUSTRIAL REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 2016
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INNOVATION CENTER
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issues are the ones you fix first.
Supply chain
Looking at parts needed for
maintenance – and making
decisions about what to stock
and what to not stock – is the age
old question. Sadly, that question
is often not even asked, as most
maintenance organizations
lack the time or dollars to do
a thorough analysis of critical
parts. If they have done this
analysis, the critical parts are not
purchased when equipment is
purchased, or stocked after the
equipment goes into service.
To improve that situation
with limited resources, and the
continual downward pressure
on indirect budgets, the solution
requires better supply chain
decisions. The optimal solution
is to divide maintenance, repair
and operations (MRO) materials,
such as replacement parts,
into two categories. The first
category is equipment-specific
parts; those parts that are
specific to machines and that
typically make up 20 percent of
your inventory, yet consume 80
percent of your cost. The second
category is common stock
items; those items that are more
universal in use. The point of
stocking these items is to never
run out of them when they are
needed. These are typically 80
percent of your inventory, yet
consume 20 percent of the cost.
The growth of vendor managed
inventory companies and the
ability to monitor ordering
through online min./max.
values and approvals is a major
benefit to today’s manufacturing
organizations. The CMMS
contains the MRO parts and
supplies needed, with a special
focus on equipment-specific
parts. If the part is not expensed
on a work order (consumed),
then quantity on hand (QOH)
cannot be maintained, resulting
in inaccurate QOH values
and the inability to use an
auto-reordering module to
recommend what needs to be
re-ordered. When QOH cannot
be managed in a CMMS or by a
vendor managed solution, the
resulting broken business system
negatively impacts production.
The ability of the CMMS
to track assets, labor, service
history, and parts is the heart of
Enterprise Asset Management.
Lacking a firm grasp on these
assets can be damaging to
short-term business success and
the long-term survival of your
company. Your CMMS “angel”
can watch over your assets
and analyze the results you are
getting plant-wide and in your
maintenance organization. It
provides data to make long-term
decisions and guides teams to
see broken business systems
and highlight which are most
important to fix.
Implementation is key
Obtaining a CMMS is the
easy part. Getting the CMMS to
conform to your business and
produce the desired results is the
hard part. The three big factors in
implementing a CMMS are cost,
competence, and culture. Most
companies that want to meet
compliance requirements forced
upon manufacturing by the
interconnected global economy
look to lowest cost first.
Companies that opt for a
low-cost solution often fail to
consider the cost to implement
the system (often three to four
times the software cost). What
most companies miss is that the
effort and process to implement
(examples: Express Maintenance
by Express Technology, under
$10,000 to purchase; or the SAP
maintenance module, over
$10,000 to purchase), is the same.
The process of going through
the CMMS lifecycle, according to
Uptime Magazine, is also the same
regardless of the purchase price.
Implementation (populating
the data tables in the correct
order with consistent
nomenclature) of the CMMS
SELECTION IMPLEMENTATION TRAINING USAGE
CONTINUOUS
IMPROVEMENTS
CMMS Lifecycle
The lifecycle of the CMMS consists of five major stages: selection, implementation,
training, usage, and continuous improvement that ensure the system will always
give the expected results along the whole usage life.
The lifecycle of any CMMS starts from the selection process, although many people
like to start it from the implementation phase. However, selection is the better
starting point because it has a significant impact on the other lifecycle phases.

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software requires competence,
and is the step most often
underestimated, yet is the most
important step. With proper
implementation, everything else
works. This requires competency
on the part of the consultant
hired to assist, and competency
by the team committed to
doing the work in-house. The
big question is, do you need
a consultant to complete the
process? I have seen 500 to 600
CMMS software implementation
projects. In the best scenarios,
the implementation was about
60 percent correct by reading
the manual and just going for it.
Sure, it looks like it is working,
but when you attempt to run
reports, the wheels fall off. When
you start looking for supporting
data, not everything needed has
been captured. If it is captured,
it might be in the wrong
location or uses inconsistent
formats or nomenclature.
Unfortunately, this leads to
blaming the software purchased,
not the implementers and the
decision-makers who blessed the
implementation process.
When selecting the software,
make sure you connect with
the engineering support team
that supports the proper
implementation of the software
(not just the sales and demo
staff). If you don’t trust the
maintenance engineering
knowledge of the support team,
or get a good feel from the
implementation person you will
be working with from the vendor,
search for another software.
Once a CMMS is embedded in
your organization, it is costly and
time consuming to switch. It also
indicates that those involved
failed and no one wants that
black mark on their career path.
The third factor impacting
the success of the CMMS is the
culture of the facility where it
will be used. Good leadership,
a trusted environment, honest
expectations, and a good
relationship all bode well for a
successful implementation. Even
when all these factors are met,
it still takes one to two years
for the business systems to be
modified to incorporate the
new tool.
Can you do without a CMMS
in today’s manufacturing
world? I don’t think so. Knowing
that reality, you might as
well embrace the CMMS and
understand the process you
are walking into. Invest in the
right resources to implement
and train, enjoy the ride and
reap the rewards that come
from utilization and continuous
improvement that are now
available. Will a CMMS result
in instant success? The answer
is no. However, it will put
your organization on the right
track for asset management,
compliance, improved business
systems, and the ever elusive
increased production and the
resulting profitability.
Gary Brown (CRT,
CET, MBA, CFP) is
president of Brown &
Associates, an Arizona-
based maintenance and facilities
EAM/CMMS implementation
company. For the past 15 years,
he has engaged with hundreds of
companies as a systems engineer,
leading them through the selection,
implementation, training, usage
and continuous improvement steps
of the CMMS lifecycle.Visit www.
cmmsmaintenancesolutions.com,
gary.brown@brown-assocs.com.
Companies that opt for a
low-cost solution often fail to
consider implementation costs