Maintenance Management

Transform your assets and equipment maintenance operations

Maintenance management and reducing the impact of breakdowns and downtime are the main objectives of maintenance. But the strategies adopted by maintenance managers to achieve this aim have undergone great changes in the past.

Maintenance is now considered more than just “repair the faulty equipment and put them back in order to minimise possible downtime”. A holistic approach assists both management and maintenance teams in planning and reporting on work being done, and supports compliance. This in turn improves the use, accessibility, and life cycle of any asset type deemed critical to the functioning of your company operations.

Let’s talk about EAM and CMMS

Preventative maintenance which is often overlooked (planning, scheduling, inspections, lubrication, alignment and storage) might be the tedious part of the job, but when it comes to performing maintenance management, you cannot forget about the fundamentals.

Proactive maintenance as part of your maintenance plan can result in significant cost savings. It is different from the reactive and preventative culture in that proactive maintenance will look at why machines break down. It may identify poor quality lubricant as a failure cause, a technician not seating a piece of equipment correctly as another failure cause and so on.

Keep service crews mobile

Maintenance managers are responsible for the smooth and efficient working of the organisation’s assets and plant equipment, improving productivity and keeping equipment in their optimum operating conditions. Hence, asset maintenance is an important service function of any efficient organisation.

Managers must take a “big picture” view of the department and direct the long-term vision and comprehensive effort around building systems, equipment operations, and safe production standards. They keep the company’s goals at the forefront of their minds and are where the buck stops when it comes to health and safety requirements, applicable laws, and regulations.

The absence of maintenance management may lead to frequent equipment breakdowns and health and safety issues. But when you can’t get maintenance work orders or access to service data on your mobile device, when you are “out in the field”, is like leaving your toolbox at home!

Deliver relevant data to your field teams

Reducing equipment downtime to an absolute minimum

Performing regular maintenance is number one for keeping your equipment up and running. You should be able to add a maintenance schedule for each piece of equipment, giving you a full overview of the maintenance schedule. Reporting on “in the near future”, or in any given range of time, will assist you in planning equipment work and downtime. Constructing a maintenance management plan is the first step to turning around a reactive maintenance department.

Read more: Hardcat RFID technology

Give field staff the right tools

Maintenance software should hold information about issues, be able to assign the task to get it fixed and follow the progress online using a mobile device. Having a full overview of all issues, both new, issues in progress, and resolve issues, will provide operational clarity. And as the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words” so taking images of issues and failures on your mobile device and attaching them to tasks, provides additional information for your technicians.

How does Hayman Island Resort use Hardcat solutions for its preventative maintenance management and job log-in?

Hayman Island – Facilities Management Solution

Maintenance and incident management on your device

Computerised Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) provide continuous cost-based prioritisation of maintenance activities. To succeed in the competitive global marketplace of today, it is vital for an organisation to optimise its operational costs.

• Create/view/edit work orders on smartphone and tablet with MiCatX in a ‘live’ connected stage

• Offline mode stores data locally on the device in areas with limited/no internet/Wi-Fi

• Audit by location or by personnel/contractor ensuring targeted and specific audits

• Work performed is reflected back to the database with no manual upload/download of data

• Covers 75% of work order management activities that can be performed in the database

• Real-time job allocation/status updates

• Jobs can be raised/updated in the office and will show up on the engineers’ phones in real-time

• Allocate work orders to an individual, groups or external maintenance management contractors

• The administrator has full visibility of real-time asset maintenance activities

• Maintenance personnel and contractors can download the MiCatX app to access assigned work orders

• External contractors can see their work schedules at all times

• Update work order information in real-time

• Reduce paperwork and time-consuming follow-up activities

• Issue and return assets to and from locations/people/tasks from anywhere adding flexibility

• Create work orders via phone/capture images when unscheduled/immediate repairs are identified

Inaccurate asset registers can cost your organisation dearly in higher taxes and insurance premiums as well as slowing down business processes. Maintaining accurate maintenance helps organisations retire end-of-life assets, track ethical disposal, add new assets, halt the purchase of unnecessary assets and manage and track existing assets more efficiently. The capture workflow feels natural and avoids repetitive data entry, reducing overall time to capture large volumes of assets.

Why you need to audit your assets and equipment

Mobile work orders and EAM Integration

Supplement not substitute; without proper integration, organisations fail to fully automate and optimise their processes.

Users of Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) systems still cannot get maintenance work orders on their mobile devices. Not having mobile access to service data when you are “out in the field” is like leaving your toolbox at home! Let’s talk about EAM and CMMS

Read more: MiCatX and EAM integration

Asset-intensive industries operate in highly competitive markets, and each time an asset fails it can be disruptive and costly. At the same time, organisations must adhere to stringent Work Health and Safety (WHS) and environmental regulations. Maintaining critical asset availability, reliability and profitability are essential to an organisation’s success.

Infrastructure and asset maintenance teams need to meet the organisation’s objectives, of operating and maintaining a sustainable infrastructure. And enterprise asset management systems are critical to facilitating and optimising the long-term management of assets.

The need to accurately consider asset performance, service level, and future viability has never been more important in striving to reduce costs and obtain improved asset uptime and availability.

Hardcat MiCatX Mobile Application

Assets | Asset Audit | Maintenance | Help Desk

Now you can deliver the right data at the right time and integrate it to disseminate data to your entire enterprise. Adopting Hardcat technology saves organisations time and money while providing comprehensive visibility on asset utilisation.

The Hardcat MiCatX application allows you to keep track of all your assets and perform maintenance and help desk/incident activities. Keep track of the following information on your mobile device:

• Where is the asset, who has it, and what condition is it in
• Perform an ad-hoc asset audit
• Perform an issue or return of an asset
• Create new assets
• Create maintenance and help desk activities against an asset
• Assign the maintenance task to an engineer
• Capture photographs illustrating the level of damage

More – Maintenance Management