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Enterprise Asset Management
The first step towards maintenance optimization
Asset Management (CMMS – EAM)
The First Step towards Maintenance Optimization
Each of your assets tells a story. True maintenance means listening to those stories, recognizing critical signals, and initiating the correct response. How can you maximize asset availability? How can maintenance management software help you achieve your goals?
What is the Purpose of Maintenance Management Software?
Maintenance management software allows you to record important information about your assets. A CMMS or EAM software allows you to optimize work processes, manage and plan work orders, manage your technical teams, and ensure knowledge retention. Knowledge that is used to improve the organization of maintenance every day.
The use of proven and easy-to-use maintenance management software helps with this and gives structure to your maintenance process. With the information from the maintenance software, you can better control maintenance processes, maintenance policy, current contracts, asset uptime and downtime, and inventory and purchasing management. It is as important to properly manage maintenance as it is to ensure that you always have the necessary stock for its execution. Therefore, this type of software helps to ensure minimum inventory stocks and manage the necessary purchases for it.
Benefits of Maintenance Management Software (CMMS – EAM)
- Efficient maintenance processes.
- Greater understanding to enhance decision-making and achieve results.
- Greater work efficiency.
- Optimized cost control.
- Greater asset availability.
What is an EAM System?
Within an organization, there are a series of key assets for the development of its activities. These assets must be managed appropriately to optimize their operation, minimizing unplanned shutdowns. A maintenance management system allows you to manage these material assets (buildings, equipment, vehicles, etc.) both inside and outside the facilities themselves.
It is also worth differentiating between the CMMS itself and an EAM system (Enterprise Asset Management). While the former focuses on maintenance management in a more vertical way, an EAM system adopts a comprehensive approach, but at the same time adaptable to specific needs. An EAM system controls and manages the entire asset lifecycle, from acquisition to retirement, thus promoting asset performance. In other words, an EAM system has more functionalities than just maintenance management.
The traditional components of a CMMS system are also included in the EAM software, so you benefit from a complete solution.
What Advantages Does an EAM System Offer?
- Increases the operational availability of assets and the efficiency of your processes. It allows you to manage and plan maintenance in a clear and simple way. In addition, it helps to perform preventive maintenance when appropriate and has the necessary tools to enable predictive maintenance.
- Optimizes the useful life of assets. Thus, it maximizes the return on investment of assets in a safe and responsible manner.
- Increases the level of safety in workspaces. Integrates comprehensive maintenance management with work permits, Lock Out Tag Out (LOTO) procedures, and incident management into a single application. All of this allows coordinating health, safety, and environment (HSE) policies with occupational risk prevention (ORP) and facilitates compliance with legislation.
- Controls maintenance budget objectives. Manages maintenance costs through clear reports and dashboards. Own application for mobile devices that allows you to work more efficiently and comfortably while reducing administrative costs.
- Stores all the knowledge that maintenance teams acquire daily to be able to use it in the future.
Main functions of EAM asset management software
1. Asset management
Asset management is vital. How is that important information recorded? Information on facilities and production and general services assets. What about spare parts, transport equipment, and tools? Not to mention knowledge of all the processes surrounding these assets.
In the asset management module, you can record the data of all assets and understand how processes can be improved. It is possible to create a hierarchy and visualize the data with a variety of explorers. It also allows you to record the relevant information of the assets for each organization, including organizational, technical information, and documentation. Due to the wide options, each organization can design its own asset structure.
2. Preventive maintenance management
Preventive maintenance refers to the scheduled and routine maintenance of an asset that essentially makes it easier for the equipment to remain operational. Preventive maintenance reduces unplanned downtime and high costs due to unexpected equipment breakdowns. Preventive measures can be difficult to track and evaluate. This is why most companies rely on preventive maintenance software to help and cope with preventive actions.
The benefits of this module include:
- Creation and optimization of preventive maintenance plans.
- Manage the human resources of the maintenance team.
- Use maintenance routes for multiple smaller maintenance activities.
- Create historical data for audits and controls.
- Use one or more easy-to-use planners to plan periodic activities and understand the workload.
If you want to go one step further and perform proactive and intelligent maintenance, some EAM systems also allow you to implement condition-based (predictive) maintenance and risk-based maintenance.
3. Corrective maintenance management
Corrective maintenance management is crucial to avoid unforeseen and costly downtime. With a proactive approach, you can identify and fix problems before they become emergencies, maximizing operational efficiency and reducing unnecessary expenses.
In many cases, the corrective maintenance to be performed is a repetitive action over time, such as a bearing change on rotating equipment. In these cases, it is necessary to have work plans configured with their resources (materials, tools, technical profile MO, etc.) so as not to have to create the work order from scratch.
Among other functionalities, for a correct management of corrective maintenance, a CMMS or EAM software must include:
- Registration and management of work requests.
- Repetitive corrective maintenance work plans
- A planner based on the workload of field technicians, where both periodic and corrective maintenance can be visualized.
- Complete history of corrective maintenance performed per asset.
- Automation of tasks and reminders for efficient monitoring
4. Autonomous maintenance management and shift changes
How do you ensure that the correct information is exchanged between all your workers?
In many companies, production technicians perform basic maintenance tasks on the assets they work with. This maintenance is known as autonomous maintenance and consists of the execution of tasks such as cleaning, inspections, and calibrations, among others.
An EAM system must allow a centralized point where information is exchanged between production operators and the maintenance department. This repository allows you to record and manage the actions carried out by production technicians in the same system where maintenance is managed.
Additionally, when there are different manufacturing and maintenance shifts, it is essential that this single source of truth exists to exchange all information between the different shifts.
5. Warehouse and purchasing management
Avoid material shortages by maintaining a minimum stock
How do you ensure that stock levels are exactly what you need?
The inventory module is essential for managing warehouses and MRO spare parts stocks. It allows you to associate spare parts and materials according to the work to be performed and control the minimum stock to avoid costly stoppages. The purchasing module automates the management of material replenishment, from budgets to invoices, ensuring adequate stock. It also allows you to manage the contracting of services from service providers.
With these modules in a CMMS or EAM system, organizations can avoid prolonged and costly interruptions by ensuring the availability of the materials needed to maintain assets. Efficient inventory and purchasing management is key to a smooth and profitable operation.
As basic and indispensable functionalities, it must include:
- Ensure you always have the desired minimum stock available.
- Automated purchase order recommendations based on stock, orders already placed, material reservations, etc.
- Monitoring of agreements and contracts with your suppliers.
- Record the complete process of warehouse management and purchase logistics.
- Optimization of minimum stocks.
- Possibility of integration with ERP.
6. Health, safety, and environment management (HSE)
Risks. Something we all want to avoid.
The integration between safety management (HSE) and maintenance management is key to improving the performance of industry and infrastructure. An HSE module within the EAM system supports this with the prevention of risks related to safety, quality, health, and the environment. When you have an integrated module for this, it is easy to demonstrate compliance with current legislation.
The module must have solutions that digitize and support the management processes of:
- Work permits.
- HSE incident management.
- Lockout / Tagout (LO/TO) procedures.
7. Project management
To cover the complete lifecycle of assets, it is extremely important to be able to manage the projects related to them, from their design to their execution. In an organization, multiple projects are carried out annually of all kinds, such as expanding a production line, modifying offices, automating assets, etc. An EAM system must have a project management module to have a centralized point where to manage and supervise all subprojects and associated works.
Among the desired functionalities of a project management module are:
- Generation of subprojects and associated work orders.
- Work order management.
- Planning of projects and their WO.
- Real-time Gantt chart.
- Registration and control of costs.
- Documentation.
8. Dashboards and reports
The objectives of an organization are to improve and grow by achieving them. Therefore, it is required to be able to monitor the status of those objectives constantly. Monitor progress, understand costs, track key department KPIs, and ensure compliance with regulations.
Therefore, it is essential that an EAM system has:
- Monitoring of planning and progress.
- Monitoring of the execution of activities.
- Guarantee of Service Level Agreements.
- Clarification of costs.
- Various statistics, such as a top 10 of causes of failures.
9. Mobility tool
Today we cannot live without a mobile phone. Without it, we have the feeling that we are missing something. The same happens with an EAM system. It is essential that it has its own mobile app to extract the maximum benefit from it and increase work efficiency.
Connecting from anywhere and with any device is essential to be able to execute any action or consult information in the field, regardless of the profile that performs it.
However, there are certain areas where we do not have mobile or WiFi coverage, therefore, it is necessary that this type of solutions also allow working in offline mode.
10. Integration
Extract the maximum value from an EAM system by integrating it with other systems
An indispensable capability in an EAM system is that it has high integration capabilities with other systems. To automate processes and extract the maximum benefit from a solution of this type, the exchange of data with other systems such as: ERP, SCADA, BIM, GIS, document managers or business analytics tools (BI) among others is essential.
With the integration of systems, it is possible to go one step further and ensure the operational excellence of the organization’s processes.
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