The early 1900s saw the rise of manufacturing companies who relied on manual asset maintenance and management operations. This meant that everything from scheduling maintenance tasks to organizing maintenance workers was done by hand, which was time-consuming and often resulted in costly asset downtime.
Thankfully, the industrial revolution led to the development of maintenance management software, which has automated and optimized many of the tasks that were once done by hand. This has allowed manufacturing companies to keep their equipment in peak operating condition with less downtime, resulting in increased profitability.
Join us as we dive deeper into how manufacturing maintenance software helps manufacturing companies streamline their maintenance operations and raise their profitability with more output and less overhead. Let’s hop in!
What Is The Manufacturing Maintenance Management Software?
Manufacturing maintenance software is a modern CMMS-based solution designed to help with manufacturing maintenance tasks. This software makes it easy to manage regular maintenance activity in a manufacturing industry.
Implementing computerized maintenance management software ensures that all the maintenance work is aided with real-time insights into asset performance. From manufacturing systems, machines, and equipment to lines or entire facilities, every repetitive and complex maintenance work, can to a certain extent, become automated. Consequently, the organization’s manufacturing maintenance system, repair, and operational (MRO) efforts remain optimized at all times.
Why Do Manufacturing Companies Need Maintenance Software?
The maintenance and manufacturing departments need to work closely together to ensure operational excellence in a manufacturing setting. If the production department does not adequately account for required maintenance, assets are likely to fail, reducing the organization’s overall productivity and increasing downtime.
Similarly, the manufacturing process will be disrupted if the manufacturing department does not account for the production schedule when planning maintenance. To avoid these issues and simplify asset maintenance and management, it is crucial for manufacturing companies to implement an efficient maintenance system. This efficiency can be achieved most effectively through an automated solution: maintenance software!
Maintenance software is a comprehensive solution that enables manufacturing-based organizations to maintain their critical assets. This modern maintenance management solution facilitates all maintenance operations while enhancing workflows.
With the right software, like the NonStop Suite, in place, manufacturing companies can reduce unwanted expenses associated with events like unplanned downtime, costly emergency repairs, and increased overhead. Moreover, integrating maintenance software ensures that production becomes more automated and efficient, running uninterrupted.
Common Challenges That Maintenance Software Solves For Manufacturing Companies
Manufacturing companies often face maintenance challenges that can reduce profit margins and lead to unplanned downtime. Having a strategic maintenance system in place, aided by modern maintenance software, can help to eliminate these bottlenecks. The most common challenges that maintenance software can help to solve include:
- Insufficient data about the assets and their maintenance history.
- Absence of reports and analytics to gauge the asset performance.
- Frequent unplanned downtimes.
- Improper scheduling of preventive maintenance tasks and recording.
- Overlap in multiple assets and multiple technicians assigned to the same asset simultaneously.
Lack of communication among teams, specifically between maintenance and manufacturing departments.
Manufacturing Maintenance Software: Benefits You Can Expect
Maintenance software provides many benefits to manufacturing companies, thus, simplifying the lives of maintenance managers. Some of the significant benefits are as follows:
Reduce Unplanned Downtime
According to a study by the Aberdeen Group, the average cost of downtime an asset-intensive business has to bear surpasses the mark of $260,000 per hour. One of the most effective strategies against this costly event is executing proper maintenance.
The manufacturing maintenance software helps in reducing unexpected asset failure to a minimum. Documenting, tracking, planning, scheduling, and executing maintenance tasks have become much more efficient and modernized with maintenance software. Hence, the assets remain well maintained, and the risk of asset breakdown interrupting production processes is minimized.
Pro Tip: With the help of the NonStop Suite, you can avoid unplanned downtimes. Manufacturing companies have witnessed an enhancement of the uptime by 39%.
Meeting Compliance Becomes Easy
In the manufacturing sector, where a company works with a large facility, lots of manufacturing equipment, and so many workers, meeting regulatory compliance is difficult. You must take suitable measures at every step to avoid a system catastrophe and comply with the regulations. Maintenance software can help facilitate the process.
As soon as there is a non-conformance, maintenance software enables your manufacturing company to identify, anticipate, and rectify it quickly. Hence, the company is easily able to meet and exceed compliance standards.
Streamline Inventory Management
Inventory management is a crucial component of any successful maintenance plan. Maintenance scheduling software gives organizations more control over their inventory, enabling managers to be notified about stock levels, reordering needs and other important information. This allows for Just-In-Time ordering, which reduces inventory costs and keeps operations running smoothly.
Schedule Preventive Maintenance
Every successful manufacturing company uses a proactive approach for asset maintenance and management instead of a reactive approach. In the context of asset maintenance, the proactive approach refers to performing preventive maintenance on critical assets. Done manually, preventative maintenance can be strenuous, but creating and scheduling a preventive maintenance plan with maintenance management software is easy.
The right software provides your company with an automated system to review the manufacturing equipment maintenance history, accordingly schedule and assign maintenance work to the available maintenance technicians. The assignees can view their tasks and duties in the system, which makes complex tasks like heavy equipment maintenance much simpler!
Manage Work Orders Efficiently
Outdated work orders that were done manually, call for tribulations. These work orders can easily be lost and misplaced, leaving the maintenance issue unattended and unresolved. As a result, the maintenance work is slowed, ultimately affecting the manufacturing process.
To cope with this challenge, manufacturing maintenance software has automated work order processing. Whenever there is a problem, the maintenance worker issues a work order in the system. The maintenance manager then tags the specific technicians to assign them maintenance tasks. The technicians are immediately notified by the software to act upon the issue. Once done with the task, technicians mark it as complete, and the software will immediately notify every associated person about it on the system.
Maintenance software can help to track and manage work orders, schedule maintenance tasks, and keep track of inventory levels of spare parts and consumables. This information can be valuable in planning future maintenance activities.
Save Valuable Time
Manufacturing maintenance software brings loads of saved work hours that would otherwise be spent on maintaining the asset repair and replacement. From issuing the work order request to completion, maintenance software induces digitalization at every level. All the tedious manual work gets off the shoulders so the company can invest its time, energy, and resources in more pressing issues. As a result, not only the manufacturing maintenance processes are sped up, but the risk of human error is also reduced.
What To Look For In a Manufacturing Maintenance Software?
Since there are dozens of maintenance management software available for manufacturing companies, deciding on the best fit can be arduous. To simplify this job, we have listed down five of the most common and essential features one should look for before committing to manufacturing maintenance software:
Asset Management:
Good asset management software will allow your company to organize and utilize the assets to the fullest. The inventory stock levels are always in the notice and optimized. Simply put, with a best-practice-driven EAM partner like NonStop Suite, manufacturing organizations can improve their asset life cycle management and ROI (Return on Investment) on assets.
Work Request & Work Order Management:
The right manufacturing maintenance software should get your company access to an automated work order management system. Look for an option that allows the users to create, complete and track work orders efficiently. With this feature enabled, maintenance scheduling, auditing, and failure analysis become effortless.
Customizability:
Look for a maintenance software that can be customized to the specific needs of a company. This allows for a more efficient and effective use of the software.
Mobile Accessibility:
An ideal manufacturing maintenance software should be easy to access on mobile devices. Asset-intensive companies need a mobilized system to manage, monitor and accelerate their maintenance strategies. With NonStop Suite, manufacturing companies can aim to future-proof their assets while mobilizing their workforce.
Maintenance Reports and Analytics:
Reports are critical to successful audits and informed maintenance-related decisions. Your maintenance management software should present the company with a centralized dashboard, in-depth reports, and audit tools. Data gathering, sorting, analyzing, and interpreting (for existing or new maintenance strategies) becomes much more manageable with an organized digital tool.
GxP & ISO Specific NC-CAPA Capabilities:
With maintenance software like the NonStop Suite, your manufacturing company can perform corrective and preventive maintenance efficiently. All potential non-conformances that may obstruct the production processes are dealt with promptly. Thus, the need for additional standalone software solely dedicated to NC-CAPA is eliminated, which makes modern solutions like the NonStop Suite invaluable for departments and operators dealing with non-conformances.
Wrap Up!
The NonStop Suite realizes the importance of maintenance software for manufacturing companies and brings comprehensive digital solutions to simplify all aspects of maintenance.
Take electronic forms, for instance. In the maintenance processes, so much documentation is needed: Maintenance checklists, recording, reporting, and whatnot! Done the old-fashioned way (on paper), this documentation is laborious, tedious, and prone to human errors. NonStop Suite eliminates these troubles with its dynamic electronic forms. Create any maintenance report on your mobile device and store it securely on the cloud-based EAM, from where you can easily share, review and audit it later. Now every manufacturing organization can digitize their maintenance documentation and go paperless!
NonStop Suite also supports manufacturing-based organizations with an NFC tagging system. These tags enable companies to record and track moveable assets. Evaluating the assets’ maintenance history also becomes relatively straightforward; every critical data is available at a simple scan!
