Easy Money for CMMS

You probably don’t need to enroll in business school or hire an accountant to get management what they need. You can generate some estimates and outline a document to help higher-ups understand the value of a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) by starting with three simple questions:

1. ”How much do we risk spending on major asset repair or replacement if we fail to adequately care for equipment through proper preventive maintenance?”
   With entry-level solutions costing $3,000 or more, professional-grade maintenance software can seem pricey—taken out of context. Its value quickly becomes apparent, though, when missed PMs result in expensive repairs. It’s even more apparent when critical assets need to be completely replaced. Review repair costs your organization incurred last year. Could some have been prevented with better maintenance record keeping? How do some of the costlier repairs compare to cost of maintenance software?
2. ”What does lost productivity cost us when important assets are down?”
   Downtime costs can add up quickly. If you work in a maintenance role, you’ve surely felt the pressure to get a critical asset repaired so a production line can get back up and running. Time is money, and the less downtime you suffer, the more your company makes. Many organizations have standard estimates for the cost of downtime. Ask your boss what an hour of lost production costs. How many hours did your company experience last year? What if you could reduce that by just 5%? Would that generate enough savings to pay for maintenance software?
3. ”How much overtime am I paying my maintenance crew?”
   If you knew exactly how many hours it was going to take your crew to conduct preventive maintenance, could you make better staffing decisions? You’ve got so many assets with so many required PMs it’s impossible to “SWAG” how many hours all that preventive maintenance work will take. You need a PM-tracking tool that tells you exactly how many hours need to be scheduled and how many people you’ll need to do the work. With accurate estimates you can hire the right number of people for the job. Without them, you’ll be paying lots of overtime. How much does that cost you compared with the price of the software?

Answering these three questions should provide you some good starting points for justifying your request for maintenance software budget Share your preliminary numbers with your manager before you draft a formal request. They’ll likely be appreciative of your efforts and much more motivated to help you get the software you need.