CMMS Use-Cases
CMMS appeals to a wide range of industries.
Companies needing to efficiently organize asset records, extend equipment life spans or identify key performance indicators (KPIs) for cost-cutting can use CMMS to set higher business goals.
The first step to finding a solution is to identify the problem.
Consider these Facility, Manufacturing, Fleet Management and Property Management success stories to help identify your own maintenance needs.
Facilities
Equipment uptime is a top priority.
Downtime often directly affects clients.
The following case studies demonstrate real world dilemmas facilities face and how CMMS provides the solution:
Gas Field Specialists, Inc. covers a range of competitive services within the oil and gas industry, and it needed a solution to effectively manage its equipment according to both government regulatory standards and individual client demands.
As the company expanded, it sought out a solution for organizing, tracking and reporting on its assets. Thanks to ManagerPlus, Gas Field Specialists was able to improve inspection and maintenance scheduling for a variety of equipment including excavators and cranes, as well as implement detailed record-keeping for meeting safety regulations, set equipment calibrations for quality control within exact specifications for the industry, and get better insight for optimizing internal management practices.
The company also used the solution’s mobile access for labor tracking to measure how long it takes to complete a work order or even how long trucks spend idle.
Our customers, if they don’t see evidence of the work they need done, they won’t do business with you. It helps us dramatically when we can show all the work orders and the history.
-Kurt McDowell
Safety Director
Gas Field Specialists
Lake Shore Gold first only used accounting software for basic cost tracking, but it realized it needed a solution for capturing the full depth of its mine and mill operations.
The company sought to replace paper-based documents with a solution that could accurately track maintenance, parts purchased and inventory control. As Lake Shore expanded into new locations, it relied on 4Site’s Accounting and Project Management modules for organizing equipment placement and asset costs. The company added additional modules for maintenance, purchasing and inventory, and the software is now used by over 60 staff members each day.
Thanks to 4Site, Lake Shore Gold was able to gain full control over its assets, and even cancel a contract for outsourcing maintenance services, cutting $150,000 from its budget.
As mine operations ramp up, the Statistics module will be increasingly valuable to us. It provides an automated way to deliver accurate and consistent operations metrics to our corporate office, and also push data to the department level, which benefits our operations people.
-Rick Stewart
Manager of Administration
Lake Shore Gold
Doyon Utilities agreed to contract services providing clean water, heat, electricity and natural gas to military camps across 27,000 acres of Alaska.
With 12 utilities, Doyon supports a population of 25,000 people and must run efficiently with minimal downtime to enable military operations in the region. The company’s utility assets include equipment and facilities that vary in age and condition, and it required a maintenance solution for making continuous upgrades within a strict regulatory environment. The harsh Alaskan conditions and locations of each facility added additional challenges to Doyon for upholding the highest level of organizational efficiency.
Thanks to ManagerPlus, Doyon was able to establish a proactive approach with a stable preventive maintenance routine, which reduced costly emergency failures. The solution helped consolidate assets, organizing highly complex systems by categories and subcategories to enable the most efficient maintenance workflow.
Doyon was able to standardize operations and track asset history to quickly report key data points back to clients.
[ManagerPlus] gives me a better understanding of needed resources, enabling us to know – Do we have too many? Do we need more? Because once you’ve populated Enterprise with all of your preventive maintenance needs, you can see, for example, that absolutely 20,000 hours of work is not enough labor to cover everything you need. Or the data tells us the other story: We’ve got too many labor hours. This really helps us with our resource allocation.
-Ed Stevenson
VP of Operations
Doyon
Manufacturing
CMMS helps manufacturing companies manage inventory, equipment and transportation assets, but also helps them adhere to standards with consumer products.
The following case studies show how CMMS users incorporate the solution into their business to improve asset care and product quality:
Pure Fishing is a globally renowned fishing tackle manufacturer, operating in 19 countries. The company decided it was time to find the right CMMS solution for tracking over 2,000 assets while going entirely paperless for its lean facility in Spirit Lake, Iowa.
Before implementing a solution, about 70% of work orders were reactive. Thanks to eMaint, Pure Fishing met the goal for 70% of work orders to be proactive through planned maintenance.
Pure Fishing was able to go entirely paperless with a customized and scalable system. The solution’s mobility allows managers access to real-time insight on maintenance operations to assign and monitor work orders from anywhere with a phone or tablet.
The solution has enhanced communication among team members and enabled maintenance technicians to set new standards within their knowledge base for maximizing the potential of their assets.
The mobile maintenance management solution offered by eMaint has really opened our eyes to what is being done on a daily basis within our production plant. It’s kind of like being born blind, and then suddenly being able to see.
-Robert Peyton
Group Technical Supervisor
Pure Fishing
Express Metal Fabricators LLC, St. George Division had purchased an MPulse solution in 1998 and upgraded in 2009, but needed help revolutionizing its maintenance operations to fully reap the benefits of the solution.
After consulting with MPulse’s tech support team and video training series, personnel were able to maximize the system’s potential for categorizing 500 equipment items, 42 trailers and numerous tools among 12 building areas. Using the solution’s tracking system has led to:
- 50% reduction in parts purchase orders
- 80% reduction in the amount of time it takes to pull inventory information
- 50% reduction in total purchasing costs
Thanks to MPulse, the St. George Division was able to drastically cut repair costs and keep up with its inventory system for full asset control.
We can determine our repair costs, and decide if it’s better to keep repairing it or just purchase another one. They wanted to know the history of a forklift, so they could see how much they had spent over the past couple of years. We had spent $30,000 on repair and labor; that’s an awful lot – we could have bought another one.
– Becky Newman
Facilities Administrative Assistant
Express Metal Fabricators
Superior Dairy has produced and distributed dairy products since 1992, and it was in need of a CMMS solution for both inventory and maintenance control while complying to numerous regulatory standards.
As a dairy company, the business follows guidelines set by The Pasteurized Milk Ordinance, and maintains a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) food system as well as a Safety Quality Foods (SQF) system. The company is frequently audited, and needed the right solution for developing reports reflecting compliance within its inventory.
Thanks to eMaint, Superior Dairy was able to integrate the CMMS solution with other regulatory systems along with the necessary preventive maintenance program for inventory and project tracking.
The solution’s barcoding feature and integrated parts lists helped staff organize assets into PM categories including Maintenance, Sanitation, Quality Control, Safety and Engineering. After eMaint was implemented, Superior Dairy passed its SQF inspection with flying colors.
I found eMaint’s X3 to be user friendly and it exceeded the standard set for the CMMS Superior Dairy needed. With support like this, everything was easily accomplished.
-Jason Wolfe
Maintenance Manager Assistant
Superior Dairy
Transportation
Solutions specializing in fleet maintenance track documents and costs related to transportation operations and assets.
This includes driver information such as history and health physicals, and vehicle identification such as plates, leases, mileages, fuel consumption, spare parts and more.
The following case studies represent the variety of fleets within industries using CMMS solutions:
The Easter Seals Blake Foundation (ESBF) offers educational and care services to children and adults with disabilities. The organization operates with a fleet component of over 100 vehicles and 700 total staff members using these vehicles.
ESBF needed a solution for tracking the maintenance needs of these vehicles to ensure each one met minimum maintenance requirements. Thanks to eMaint, ESBF conducts maintenance at structured intervals, ensuring the vehicles are safe while saving on overall maintenance costs.
eMaint’s system gives both calendar-based and meter-based PM work orders, notifying maintenance staff when it’s time to inspect equipment. Storing maintenance history has allowed ESBF to identify maintenance trends, visually displaying its cost savings with trend reports from the solution.
Now that we use eMaint, all of our vehicles are being maintained at minimum intervals. This means safer, more reliable vehicles and less overall maintenance.
-Lucas MacFarland
Physical Assets Manager
ESBF
Columbia Helicopters is one of the world’s largest heavy-lift helicopter companies in the world with 30 aircraft units and almost 2,000 individual pieces of equipment for supporting operations.
Columbia Helicopters needed a solution for more than just tracking its helicopters — its business is supported by a diverse fleet of vehicles including trucks for carrying aircraft, and individual pieces of equipment for safety and fleet care.
Thanks to Collective Data, Columbia Helicopters was able to organize maintenance data specific to its diverse needs. Custom dashboards and reports allow the company to view high-level trends on maintenance costs and the use of catalogued equipment items. The company can identify exactly where an asset is located and reserve resources for preventive maintenance at the right time.
A tremendous amount of labor has been saved by eliminating the need to go through individual files to tabulate various costs. It is now all available at the push of a button.
-Rick Carroll
Fleet Manager
Columbia Helicopters
Idaho Transportation Department experienced a disconnect with interdepartmental communication and needed a solution for measuring and displaying overall asset performance.
Thanks to AgileAssets, the agency was able to improve transparency for KPIs and allow effective planning for inventory resources. The solution provides a single point of data entry, connecting expenses between payroll and maintenance for complete budget forecasting.
Idaho Transportation Department now has a clear view of its inventory expenses, aiding the municipality with fast and informed decision making.
Property Management
For companies in the property management industry, CMMS helps organize maintenance tasks specific to needs involving a building’s infrastructure.
CMMS can organize maintenance needs by assets within room numbers for hotels, by slot machines on a casino floor, by cooling or heating equipment central to the building and much more according to the type of property.
CMMS can organize any number of customized assets. The following case studies represent a range of solutions for property management:
Riddle Memorial Hospital managed maintenance operations with a CMMS solution that became overly complicated, and it desired a new solution more in line with its industry and staff’s priorities.
Riddle Memorial Hospital searched for a solution with better reporting capabilities, understandable terminology for daily users, ready-to-use work order templates and inspection scheduling.
Thanks to MicroMain, the hospital’s team leaders can better delegate tasks to improve efficiency. The system tracks corrective and preventive work orders for staff to easily monitor. Complaints involving heating and cooling have gone down from 190 to just seven since switching to the new system.
MicroMain has been described as the backbone of the maintenance department and has helped develop the hospital into one of the top 100 intensive care units in the country.
We don’t do any work unless it goes through the MicroMain system. And at the push of a button, I can see exactly how many corrective and preventive maintenance work orders are open and closed, and who is doing what. This kind of reporting is extremely helpful as we continue to improve our efficiency.
-David Adcock
Facilities Manager
Riddle Memorial Hospital
The University of Central Florida (UCF) has the second largest student body in the country with almost 60,000 enrolled students across 1,500 acres of campus.
As the campus grew, so did the need for a new CMMS solution that could retrieve the data needed to optimize efficiency. The solution needed to show how the maintenance team could improve with actionable insights.
Thanks to AssetWorks, UCF’s facilities maintenance team was able to implement a system for preventive and corrective work orders and leverage full transparency over improvements to the college. Staff found the solution surprisingly easy to use without sacrificing specificity for reporting needs.
The iDesk module especially helps maintenance staff who need access to the system through a phone or tablet. Tracking labor hours and the progress on work orders has become easier while also reducing the college’s environmental footprint.
Through the process of analyzing this data, we’ve discovered that 20 percent of our buildings are occupying 80 percent of our time. And all this information helps us make decisions when we build new buildings—how to use different equipment and how to organize buildings differently.
-David Norvell
Assistant Vice President for Facilities
UCF
Dallas Zoo is the oldest and largest zoo in Texas, covering 106 acres of land. Zoo staff once recorded maintenance tasks for over 200 animal housing facilities with handwritten notes and various spreadsheets, and it sought to optimize its maintenance operation with CMMS.
Thanks to MicroMain, Dallas Zoo was able to organize its unique assets such as automatic gates, zoo vehicles, environmental storm drains and restraint devices for a full view of inventory-related costs while caring for the grounds and animals.
Staff estimate the solution helps save over 30 hours per week on maintenance tasks now that work orders are organized and labor services carefully tracked.
MicroMain enables the managers and supervisors to view completed work requests versus open work requests and labor hours to assess the technician’s performance. It also allows managers and supervisors to prioritize pending work and follow up with the technician’s progress.
-Sheilah Spencir
Facilities Administrative Assistant
Dallas Zoo