Computerized Maintenance Management Software is an awesome tool that aids maintenance professionals in becoming more organized. CMMS software streamlines maintenance processes, doing everything from simple requests, to work orders, preventive maintenance, inventory management and downtime time tracking.

With daily activities always on the go, keeping work orders and other information together is challenging. If you know how to best use in your maintenance software, completing the work that needs to get done is so much easier.Here are five benefits of CMMS work order software to better organize and improve efficiencies in their maintenance departments.

Categorize Maintenance Work

Typically, work orders can vary between different actions and responsibilities. Depending on the details related to a work order, there may be different procedures to follow. Some work may relate to infrastructure, where others are for an equipment repair. Proper association of related work orders helps find patterns in facility maintenance. There may also be projects or departments which need to have their work order history distinguished from the rest of the work orders

One resource to use in CMMS is work order software. Create custom names of maintenance activities and departments (plumbing, electrical, flooring, etc.). Any work order created can be then filed under one of the categories which will associate it with every work order from the same category or subcategory. 

By creating a list of categories and subcategories, you can better arrange maintenance activities to one another and better structure maintenance reports. This may reveal patterns in breakdowns or departments who have more critical maintenance problems.

Assign User-Permissions for Maintenance Roles

If you have multiple users in your maintenance management software system, keep in mind what your technicians and maintenance team members see. If their role is to monitor the electrical, they probably shouldn’t work orders for cleaning the windows when they log in. Managers, who’s role is to verify completed work, should be the only ones to mark work orders as completed. To help them focus, their user access should only be related to what their roles and responsibilities are.

Depending on your software, you may have a fixed number of user licenses for your maintenance system. Take some time to review each person’s role and what their user permissions are set to. If needed, many software companies have tech support available to help you. Contact them to help walk you through what user access each member should have.

Schedule Maintenance Reports

As mentioned earlier, reporting can be time consuming without the right tools. If you know the type of maintenance reports you need to track many software systems can have them preset for you. With Hippo CMMS, our customers create saved reports to review specific maintenance activity – equipment downtime, repair costs, vendor performance, etc. These are available to view or have scheduled to be sent to an email list regularly.

Minimize or Eliminate Paperwork

Improving work order management involves using the best method to keep track of the process from start to finish. Printed work orders can get lost in between transferring from one person to another. This makes it harder to recall for important reviews. It can be a real hassle searching for content and documents when you need them most. That’s why it’s helpful to consider the alternative to paper – which is less paper or none at all.

If possible, scan your print copies of equipment manuals or O&M manuals to save on your computer. These then can be uploaded into your software as PDF files for you to access when needed.

Import Vendor and Supplier Contacts

When contacting vendors for servicing, it’s always good to streamline the process however possible. Providing the right information is key to getting the service or price quote needed.

By importing the contacts for your vendors, you can vendors be associated directly to work orders in your system. This then becomes a tool to follow-up and review vendor performance over time. It’s also useful to know if you’re receiving the best value. Set a scheduled report of vendor performance with the work orders assigned to them. You may see if you’re getting great value or that it’s time to look for another vendor.

With the use of these resources you can lighten the load of day-to-day organization. Setting up appropriate categories and subcategories to recall related tasks. Structure each users account in the system to their relevant roles in the maintenance team. Look to schedule maintenance reports ahead of time to properly work on reviewing information. Having your vendors in your cmms software (also known as facility management software) can help to streamline communication and review their performance.

By planning ahead, reducing what’s not needed and streamlining your steps, it take less time to get more done on your workload.

 

 

About The Author

Jonathan Davis

Jonathan has been covering asset management, maintenance software, and SaaS solutions since joining Hippo CMMS. Prior to that, he wrote for textbooks and video games.
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