If your plant is typical, you’re using your computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) to manage your work order system but not much else. Although a CMMS certainly can streamline work order management, it can also turn disparate data into reports that have real meaning and utility for you. For starters, it can tell you how well or poorly your department is meeting each of its key performance indicators (KPIs). You can use this information to know where attention is needed.
If you structure things correctly and your CMMS is capable, you can generate reports for drilldown purposes. For example, overall availability is below the target. That is only marginally helpful. Next, you generate a report that shows you equipment availability by production department.
It turns out that one department has particularly low availability. Next, you generate an equipment availability report that is filtered to include only that department. Now you see several pieces of equipment in that department have low availability; this hints at a root cause.
Think about the kinds of “give me insight” reports you can design and run. Talk with your CMMS vendor for recommendations.
