Podcast: 3 CMMS strategies to eliminate redundant maintenance work

TW: So no more copying and pasting the same activity over and over for each asset. You simply write it once the right way, and tie it to all the assets required.

BH: Right, correct. And now the third element there is the schedule. Just because I have 500 like assets doesn't mean that I have to have 500 like schedules. Because now that schedule can be tied to the asset with that activity and say, well, this activity on this asset is going to be a monthly or every 30 days or every 500 running hours or whatever the schedule is, whether it's a time-based schedule, or a meter-based schedule. or that condition-based schedule, if you're able to tie that into your data and you get some PLC data in there to drive and trigger that PM, right? 

But that schedule then, plus the activity, plus the asset – now the paperwork will generate. Now you're going to get that paperwork coming out, and Bob the Lube Tech is going to have that paperwork in his hand when it's supposed to be in his hand for that particular asset. And you only had to do it one time and connect it to that asset one time.

TW: So I'm thinking of the other asset classes like a rolling bearing, which could benefit from this. Steam traps, for example. You don't need a new procedure or activity for every single steam trap in your facility.

BH: Yeah. Write it one time. and standardize it. Now, the efficiencies, the light came on for one of our customers recently, where we were helping them with PM optimization, and we were kind of going through this process, and they realized that they could leverage some of this functionality built into the CMMS. 

For them, they have like assets over 60% of their entire network. So 60% of North America has the same assets, right? And they're in food and beverage, so you can imagine, you're making food or you're making beverages and it's all the same assets everywhere. All of a sudden, right in the middle of doing this for one site, they took a big, just almost stopped in their tracks and the light came on and said, wait a minute, if we do this once, this is going to result in being able to tie this to every asset across the network. This is like a $7 million per month cost savings. It was an enormous number. I can't remember exactly the exact number, but it was on that type of scale. I was like, my god, you guys got it, like the light came on. 

Now not only are they saving the planners time, they've got one person at corporate partnering with all these guys at these different sites, learning the best practices, write that activity one time, and it's in a library where everybody can pull from it out of their CMMS, and suddenly, man, that workload is like just minimal for creating and modifying and updating those PMs.

TW: I'm thinking of an extreme case, the miles and miles of conveyor belt assets in every Amazon warehouse. If your operation is at all similar to something like Amazon or the food company that Brian just talked about, really think of this tip number one as an easy way to eliminate repetitive work, and frankly, free your people up for more valuable tasks on hand. All right, well, that's number one. Brian, what's the second thing that you have to talk to us about today?

BH: Well, let's switch from PMs to correctives, right? I know that my planners, when I was a planning manager in the steel industry, my planners, again, were taught, “Hey, we got a corrective work order? Well, let's start with the asset and let's write that work order,” and they're basically interfacing from that front end. We’ve got the asset, we've got the corrective activity, we're going to write the tasks and everything that go into that, and we're going to publish that, and there's the corrective work order, right? 

But what we don't realize a lot of times is that it's almost the same back end to the correctives as it is to the PMs. The activity module, the one that's the operation or the activity or the task or whatever it is, right, is exactly the same module inside your CMMS for correctives as it is for PMs. The only difference is you don't tie it to a schedule. 

So let's say we've got an activity for a PM inspection and we go out and we're supposed to – and let's keep it simple, like our cars, right – “inspect the tread depth on your tires.” Okay, perfect. We all know about that because we go into the dealership and they say, nope, your tires are good. Or at some point we get below 5/32 and they say, well, hey, it's about time, next time you come in, we should probably change your tires out because it's getting a little sketchy here. And then the next time you come in, you're at about 4/32 or 3/32 and they say, well, let's change your tires, right? 

So there's a condition there, and the activity is inspect the tread depth. And that's on a schedule, which is every 5,000 or every 10,000 miles, right? Well, we go on the other side of that, there's an activity, change the tires, right? So the same activity module that houses “inspect the tread depth” is the same activity module that has “change the tires,”, except this time I'm going to tie it to an asset. I'm going to tie it to my Toyota Tundra, right? But I'm never going to schedule it. What I'm doing is I'm waiting for the PM to come back with a finding, and the activity lives in the natural inherent job plan library that lives inside your CMMS. 

We all coach everybody, go build a job plan library and everybody's like, oh, let me write all these Word documents and put them in the SharePoint and name them. No, it lives inside your CMMS! All you have to do is write that procedure in an activity and leave it hanging there, attached to the asset for it to be called up when you need it. Then you generate it instead of time or cycles or something else generating it. And now you've got a job plan activity. And if you write job plans for the stuff that you would find on your PMs, you're already ahead of the game.

So we've used the same module. We've used it for PMs and now we've used it for correctives. and suddenly the work is getting less and less. You wrote it, you had to correct it once, right? You're going to correct it again. Why not just leave it in there as an activity? Just let it sit there.

TW: So reduce the number of redundant files in there. Single point of truth for the corrective plan. And as Eruditio always recommends, I mean, have everyone invested in that corrective plan too. You can give levels of access to that activity. But again, it's a place where everyone can go to improve the plan as needed over time, right?

BH: Yeah, it's excellent.

TW: All right, well, we're getting to the big finish, point number 3. We've got two steps to drive efficiencies and reduce redundancies. What's #3?

BH: On Monday this week, we did a workshop on advanced job plans, right? And this is specifically for correctives. And so we rolled this out this week and really there's two ways to be more advanced with your job planning. One is either be more efficient with your paperwork, so we introduced the idea of checklists where you don't want to do a full job plan for a guy who's fully trained. He knows what he's doing. Give him a checklist so he doesn't forget anything, but let him take care of it. 

But on the other side, a lot of us have to deal with outages, shutdowns, annual periods where we go into maintenance and we're out for a week or two weeks and we're doing some really major stuff. And if I ask, if I surveyed everybody out there today and I said, “Hey. Have you ever started a shutdown or an outage only to realize about a day or two into it that something didn't go as planned?” That crane that was supposed to be over here was still over there because somebody didn't schedule it right, and now it has to be in two places at the same time. 

You get these critical resources and we don't realize, I think we go into it a little bit blind with a little bit of hope and we say, “Well, I hope nothing conflicts with each other. It should be fine. We do this every year!” only to find out that as soon as you start, things start to fall apart because with those assumptions, eventually one of them's wrong, right? 

So one of the things that we don't, I'll say that we use well in one way but we don't use well in another, is the resources in your CMMS. And SAP, it's called a work center. In Oracle, I think it's a resource, but depending on what it is, what I'm talking about is that craftsperson. Right, so you've got your maintenance craft, you've got your instrument tech, you've got your electrician, you've got, you know, fill in the blank with whatever craftspersons you have at your facility – but none of us probably put cranes as a resource. And none of us probably put forklifts as a resource or, fill in the blank with any other piece of equipment. 

But that resource, if it's not in the right place at the right time, can kill your project, can kill your outage. So creating a resource for that 40 ton crane with the 100 foot boom, whatever it is, the one that you only have one of that has to support or the one that you rent, and they're going to bring one out there, and you just got to make sure it's in the right place at the right time. So we don't write that into the work order as a resource, and we don't write the correct number of tasks every time we have a resource change. 

So here, task number one, we write the work order, we're going to remove and replace that gearbox. and the task is “remove and replace the gearbox.” But you need an electrician to lock it out. Well, first you need an operator to position the equipment, then you need an electrician to lock it out, then you need two mechanics to prepare that gearbox for removal, remove base bolts, remove couplings, right? And you see where the resources are shifting around. And then you've got another two mechanics who are strapping the new one to go in and strapping the old one to come out. And then you need a crane and two mechanics to lift it out and put the new one in. And then you need two mechanics to do the alignment. 

You can see that coordination now, because this one job requires 6 different resource types that come and go and come and go and come and go at a time when everybody's working for 12 hours and the jobs are going around the clock for two weeks. It's just exhausting to try and mentally wrap our heads around, “Where does everybody have to be right now?” Some of us have gotten pretty good at it. I know some people that I've worked with that are really good at managing this in their heads, but the only problem is that we're not perfect at managing it in our heads. And even those guys that are good fall down sometimes. 

If we teach our planners to use the functionality, the activity functionality, we're going to rewrite our job plans for these major outages to write a brand new activity inside that work order every time the resource mix changes. Task #1 is for an operator: move the stuff to where it needs to be for the outage. Task #2 or task #20 is the lockout tagout: there's my electrician. Task #30 is two mechanics. Task #40 is two mechanics and a crane. Task #50 is, you know, whatever it is. And you just keep going through. 

Every time that resource mix changes, write a new task with a new time estimate. And what happens is, your CMMS can actually Gantt chart the entire thing. And if it can't, export it to Microsoft Project, and it will. And when you line up all those jobs on top of each other, and you highlight and filter it out and say, I just want to see the tasks that have a crane, and suddenly you realize, I have six jobs, all at exactly 12 p.m. on Tuesday, and they all need that one crane – we're about to crash. 

Now you get the opportunity before you even pull the trigger and start this thing to say, “We either need more cranes or we need to shift our timelines. How are we going to get around this?” But that means that you're much, much more likely to step across that line of departure, and start this thing with being able to be successful rather than walking blindly right into that pitfall.

TW: Wow. So if I heard you right, use the resource function to list the occasional asset which is in high demand, and that way you can see the best path through all the jobs required. And especially you can see when jobs are stacking up on each other with the same demand for that asset. 

Well, you're making me appreciate the relative simplicity of scheduling our one Kia Sedona in the family to get the kids to soccer and ultimate frisbee and the dance on the weekend. So maybe I'll try and get on someone's instance of eMaint or SAP and borrow the resource function and put the Kia Sedona in there.

BH: Now I'm going to tell you what this costs, right? For those of you guys that are like, yeah, but we just don't have the time, or how are we going to train everybody to do this? The amount of knowledge transfer that's needed to understand this functionality is much less than one week in the classroom for your planner. It's probably more like on the order of 8 to 16 hours. So one to two days in the classroom. 

All you have to do is start pulling and asking the right questions. Be like, “Hey, I know this functionality exists. Somebody help me put together a training package that is a role-specific training package for my planners so they learn this specific functionality. Activities, assets, schedules, saving those activities and using resources on the activities that are mechanical or technical resources rather than a person resource.” You invest that one or two days of training for your planner and it is going to change everything. It's going to change everything.

TW: Well, fewer fights over resources, fewer conflicts, a lot less redundant work being done. So ask yourselves, like Brian's saying, what's the value of that 16 hours?

BH: Imagine hiring four more planners with the one that you have, right? But you're going to do that if you put this functionality in their hands because that's how much less work they're going to be doing.

TW: Okay. Well, I'm going to add our Xbox and our Switch to the resource list to reduce fights in the house, I'll put a duration on each of those. We can give them each, you know, like a two-hour block to prevent fights. Brian, once again, it's been great hanging out with you all week at Marcon. And again, you've nailed something direct and something people can do on Monday morning to really start optimizing their operation. So thanks for being here again.

BH: Oh, I love it every time. Thanks, Tom, for having me.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.

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