You know you need CMMS software. But your boss isn’t so sure.
So, how do you get them on board?
Starting by considering how to help them achieve their goals. It will make them look good, and it will motivate them to nurture and support your CMMS implementation efforts. For the business case and the numbers leadership will ask for, see budget approval kit.
What Does Your Boss Need?
For maintenance workers, getting the job done means checking things off the list. The value of the work is a job completed. Executive managers, however, think about costs versus benefits. The value of the work is the return on investment (ROI) for the organization.
Managers are responsible for coordinating resources (assets and personnel) toward the achievement of quantifiable goals. If your senior managers are doing their jobs well, they’ll primarily be concerned with “hitting their numbers.” Depending on their level or their title, those numbers could include any of the following:
- Units produced
- Savings generated
- Revenue generated
- Net gain in productivity
- Quality (measured in various ways)
- Cycle time
Count on your company’s senior managers to care how CMMS will affect the organization’s numbers—especially the ones important to them. They’ll need assurance that the new software will impact performance in a positive direction.
What is the Pain Point?
When you purchase or upgrade CMMS software, you always have a problem, or a pain point, that you’re trying to solve. Your boss has pain points too, but they may be different.
Usually, the catalysts for change fall into one of four pain points:
- Functional: A functional pain point occurs when an existing system isn’t delivering on a core maintenance-related function.
- Technological: A technological pain point occurs when the system you’re currently using is no longer a match for the way you need to conduct the management, execution, and tracking of maintenance.
- Organizational: Organizational pains are ones that “roll downhill” to you from other places in the organization. You inherit them from someone else who’s feeling pain and requires you to fix it.
- Scalability: Scalability pains are driven by organizational growth, which causes you to make system and process changes.
You probably know your pain points, and you may have more than one. But your boss may have different pain points. The more specific you are about the problem, the easier it will be to find the right solution for both of you.
How Can CMMS Help?
So how can you satisfy their specific demands—without having to earn an MBA? Simply ask. Sometimes just making the effort to find out what’s most important to them will be enough. And you’ll likely come away from the discussion with a much clearer idea of the reports they’ll want from a maintenance software solution.
A few good questions to start with:
- What key business metrics do you watch most closely?
- What top three things would you want to achieve with a new CMMS?
- How would you like the CMMS to improve company performance?
- Does the product need to include certain reports?
Using that information, ask yourself how your boss is likely to be affected—and how they might react to the coming changes in systems or processes. A little time thinking about “why” will go a long way towards getting support from your boss.
When you find the right CMMS software for your team, you’re on your way to creating an efficient and productive maintenance department that can cope with the constant change of modern maintenance.
And that’s the bigger goal of every manager.
Contact us to learn more about how MPulse can help your organization.
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