Someone forgot to tell your equipment, the equivalent of a large investment waiting to break down, that the budget’s been cut. It keeps running like it always did. No cutbacks, no planned furloughs. It doesn’t seem fair. You have to continue catering to its every need with less money and less manpower but the equipment isn’t willing to make any sacrifices. So how do you cope with this situation? You have two possible solutions:
- Whine, cry and plead with your equipment to not break and to extend the life of all its parts. This can escalate to threats of power removal if the equipment is not responsive.
- Implement or increase use of a CMMS. Yep, I just suggested that you spend money when your budget is cut.
Here’s how I justify my proposition to spend.
Work Orders
If you don’t have a CMMS in place, implementing the work order management portion of the CMMS will translate into a 10% – 20% gain in productivity. If you save 1 hour a day (12.5%) for tradesmen/field techs with an annual salary of $35,000, you save $4,375 per year per employee. For a crew of 5 that translates to $21,875 a year or over 162 hours per year. And that’s only work orders. If you purchased this from TeamWORKS, you could do it for less than $5,000.
Preventive Maintenance
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Preventive Maintenance will lead to a savings of 12% – 18%. This is a savings of your total operations cost. This savings includes labor, materials, asset replacement and energy usage. If your maintenance and operations budget is $2.5 million then the average savings would be $375,000 each year.
There are plenty of other savings to be found in a well implemented CMMS. Tracking your warehouse inventory allows you to only buy what you need at the quantities you need from the vendor with the best pricing. Asset tracking helps with capital planning when you are purchasing new assets and maintaining your existing assets.
Spending a few thousand dollars now can save you tens of thousands next year. The return on your investment starts immediately and will increase over time. Think about it.