Validate your maintenance strategy and process to drive improvements in your program and maximize the benefit of your CMMS or Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) implementation. As a maintenance manager, reliability engineer, or site leader, you should be conducting routine assessments of your maintenance program. Some of the basic questions you should be asking yourself might be:

• Have you optimized your maintenance systems and organization?
• If you've implemented a CMMS or EAM system, are you realizing the maintenance improvements you hoped to achieve?
• Are you using it to its potential?
• Are you using it to optimize your processes or have your processes changed to fit the CMMS?

The assumption that business process improvements come with the introduction of a CMMS or EAM is untrue and has been discounted by experienced buyers and every consultant in the industry. Have you seen the anticipated benefits of establishing maintenance work processes? Are they being followed? Are they effective? In order to realize business process improvements, you need to concisely and specifically identify shortcomings in your CMMS usage and maintenance processes.

Much like a chain, where the whole is only as strong as the weakest link, a process depends on adherence to each task in the process flow in order to be successful. Consider developing a methodology to validate compliance across all key maintenance processes from the Fundamentals of Maintenance to maintenance strategies. Include a process for determining which improvements will bring the most value and which are quickest and easiest to implement. Then, chart and trend compliance to support continual improvement toward industry recognized standards as your maintenance program and CMMS usage matures.

Tip provided by: Jeromy Risner CMRP -Consulting Engineer
AssetPoint
Tel: +1 864.679.3500