As your business grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to hire additional employees and invest in assets and equipment to keep your business running. You need to have your guide to the right CMMS Selection to manage the maintenance of your business.
You need to assess the effectiveness of your current maintenance operations to keep up with your competition and growing maintenance needs.
CMMS software will be the right option to do that easily and quickly. There are some CMMS selection criteria you should know about.
To help you make the right decision, here is a guide to selecting the right CMMS software. This guide offers three phases you should follow as your CMMS selection guidelines.
Phase 1: Determine and Select Your Team
Any software or technology depends on the team using it. To get the most benefit from CMMS, you should ensure a team with the skills to understand, maintain, and use it.
One of the essential CMMS selection criteria is to build a good team and ensure that everyone in that team has the training, bandwidth, and support they need to contribute effectively to manage maintenance operations.
Read on to learn more about who you will need in your team and how to select suitable employees.
Who should be involved in the CMMS selection process?
Choosing the right employees in your CMMS selection team will increase your chances of selecting the right CMMS system for your organisation. The team you will consult should be consisted of the following:
Maintenance Managers: CMMS administrator oversees the daily maintenance activities, and they care about the system. We recommend that you involve maintenance managers early in the CMMS selection process to be trained from the beginning.
Inventory Managers: Inventory management is a crucial feature of maintenance management. Be sure to talk to your inventory manager about which CMMS features or issues are most relevant to your business.
Technicians: Your technicians will use your CMMS more than anyone else, so they have to be in the loop. They can also give you essential insight into what features or usability concerns are most relevant to them and help them do maintenance operations.
Operators: Machine operators optimise many work orders and are familiar with asset conditions and concerns, so they should be in your CMMS selection process.
IT Team: The IT team will help with both CMMS selection and implementation.
Reliability engineers: Since reliability engineers refine the overall asset maintenance plan, fully utilising the CMMS and implementing an effective preventive maintenance strategy requires the involvement of reliability engineers.
Safety Personnel: It’s a good idea to talk to your health and safety team about your CMMS to see what compliance features you should consider.
Executives: Nothing happens without approval from critical decision-makers. Executives will use insights from CMMS to make data-driven decisions about the future of the business.
Phase 2: Define Your Goals
Like any data-related tool, you should start with a clear understanding of what the tool needs to do.
So, once you have all the relevant insights, you will need to define your goals before selecting enterprise CMMS.
It would be best if you defined short-term and long-term goals and KPIs. We recommend you follow some tips to define these goals and track your business progress.
5 Tips help you define your goals
Discuss with your maintenance managers and key decision-makers to determine what your company needs to go ahead.
Know more about your business performance and errors, such as high downtime and compliance concerns. Try to identify root causes and develop plans to beat CMMS problems.
Try with your maintenance team to clearly understand your systems, processes and areas that need improvement. This will be very helpful during selecting CMMS.
Be sure to set goals for the future, next quarter, one year, three years and five years.
Understand your current costs and learn precisely where and how a CMMS can help you reduce and manage costs.
Phase 3: Evaluate Your CMMS Options
Let’s assume you’ve set your goals and decided that a CMMS is the best option for your business.
Next, you should review each CMMS software option’s specific features and details until you select a CMMS that offers the correct cost, features, and technical integration for your business.
Selecting a CMMS that fits your business needs
You probably already know about several possible solutions for a computerised maintenance management system for your business. But here are some points you should put in your mind:
The budget: put your outlining budget for 1 or 2 years and know how much you can afford to spend on CMMS software.
Features: determine the performance of your assets and know what features they could integrate with to select the right CMMS technologies.
Timeline: define your company’s timeline to know your deadlines and implement CMMS software effectively up to your timeline.
The Broader Environment: examine your existing systems and tools to know the suitable CMMS that could integrate with your current systems and environment.
IT capabilities: ensure your IT team can install a CMMS system.
The best CMMS systems are constantly evolving and adding new features. The basic functionality of work order management, preventive maintenance, and asset and equipment management remains consistent.
Understanding CMMS’s benefits will help you select the right software for your organisation. Involve your team, ask questions, define your goals, and choose your CMMS.