CMMS Helps Analyze Increasing Amount of Datatest

By Dan Hounsell, Editor

July 2014

Armed with mobile technology that is capturing greater amounts of data and a CMMS that helps departments manage that data, managers and supervisors are able to more effectively analyze the data and identify opportunities to improve.

“Although we are in the early stages of this new style of process improvement, it has become evident that one of the largest identified areas of waste is time waiting,” Critchley says. “So many of the KPIs (key performance indicators) that we have initially focused on are date-driven and relate to turnaround time, time to fill orders, customer time waiting, etc.”

For the University of New Mexico, access to more data is enabling the department to modernize its approach to maintenance.

“One of the most important (KPIs) for us our preventive maintenance (PM) work,” Van Cleve says. “We are trying to get to a level of 25 percent corrective maintenance and 75 percent preventive maintenance. So instead of putting out fires, we’re going to try to prevent the fires from happening. I create dashboards for our area managers.

“We use a zone concept, and we have four zones on campus. Each area manager has dashboards that can look at open preventive maintenance work orders by their area or by their shops or by their trade or even down to the technician. The technicians are given so many days to complete a PM. It depends on whether it’s an emergency generator filter change. One of the things we watch is how often they miss the deadline, and that is tied to their performance review.”

The greater reliance on data to analyze trends, identify opportunities and make smart strategic decisions has put greater emphasis on the roles of those in departments responsible for CMMS operation.

“As the CMMS administrator, I work with all of the departments and customers to provide them with data and analysis services that can help meet their needs,” Critchley says. “I will often try and review data with them and help spot trends and offer some suggestions for other possible reports that may help determine root cause issues.”

Along with this greater emphasis comes greater pressure to ensure the process goes smoothly and provides reliable data.

“If I was not intimately knowledgeable about the data, I could just give them a data set, but it may not be accurate,” Van Cleve says. “I do have a deep understanding of what I’m reporting on, and I do analyze it for accuracy. Part of my job is to listen to upper management to find out what they need because a lot of times it ends up being the opposite of what they initially said they needed. Part of my job is to try to understand what they’re doing and then let them know what I can do and what the system can do for them.”