NTT Blog

Why company-wide buy-in is critical to a successful CMMS program and movement to a better preventative maintenance schedule.

To optimize your PM schedule with a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System), key stakeholders at your company must be moved to invest time and money and commit to changing the way things are done. Without this support, you will not be successful in implementing a CMMS.

As your company’s maintenance manager, you are in the best position to champion the necessary buy-in to shift to a modern, data-driven solution. Consider each stakeholder’s top concerns. Identify the time, money, and resource savings each division will reap from this investment. Think about how a CMMS will minimize risk to their division while making their decisions based on analytics.

Plant Manager — final decision-maker, top concern, profitability.

Reliable data from the CMMS in minutes vs. time-consuming and varying paper reports allows for insight, analysis, and data-driven decisions to drive profitability. With a CMMS, the Plant Manager can:

• Analyze and predict maintenance costs using historical data
• See trends like lower defect rates and decline in repair times
• Track impact of maintenance on production
• Know when production is consistently hitting minimum run-time goals and staying on schedule
• See an increase in plant equipment efficiency, and thus profitability
• See the quality of information entered in the CMMS by the maintenance manager and team

Operations/Production Manager — responsible for meeting production goals, top concern, run-time.

They need to know how a CMMS program eases the maintenance burden on production:

• Minimizes unplanned downtimes which equal unplanned expense
• Long-lead parts are at the ready because they’ve been ordered in advance
• Predictable fine-tuned adjustments made with minimal down time
• Avoid costly catastrophic failures

Purchasing Manager — oversees plant expenditures, top concern, cost control.

They need to know how a CMMS program makes expenditures more predictable, and thus part of a planned budget.

• Analyze and predict maintenance costs
• Data-informed analytics and decision-making places the focus on profitability
• Know which parts and how many were ordered in the past
• Know how often critical parts need to be replaced and how to adequately stock spares
• Get ahead of lead times for hard-to-get parts
• See greater value over time — more insight and budgetary projections

Maintenance Team — report to the maintenance manager, top concern – workload.

Your team needs to know how a CMMS will make their job easier.

• Analyze maintenance time, costs, and sequence
• Track and analyze work order failures to predict future needs
• Search by key words
• See the preventative maintenance schedule
• Set up automatic reminders for routine checks and maintenance tasks
• Order smaller, low-cost parts
• Accurate, up-to-date, complete data will minimize conflicts with production and purchasing

Company-wide buy-in on your predictive, preventative maintenance plan is a must because you’ll be asking for time and money in the short-term. Equally as important, the long-term success of a CMMS is dependent upon leadership in each division backing workflow and behavior changes to drive profitability.

NTT expert trainers with experience in military, industrial and manufacturing are here to help walk-you through the steps to achieving short-and long-term buy-in. We also offer in-depth training on how to build a new CMMs or evaluate and optimize your current system.