How to Get More Value From Your CMMS

0:00
Tara Holwegner: Hello listeners and welcome to another episode of Get Smartr, an LCE podcast. Today we’re gonna sit down to discuss a tool most organizations already have, but few are fully leveraging. I’m talking about CMMS, or a computerized maintenance management system, or an enterprise asset management system as well. Both apply. This episode we’re gonna break down why many implementations fall short and how to shift from reactive data storage to proactive asset management.

1:00
Tara Holwegner: We’re going to learn about what best in class organizations do differently to turn their CMMS or their EAMS into a driver of reliability, cost control, and performance. In today’s episode, I’m joined by Terry Alexander. Terry is a senior reliability engineer here with us at Life Cycle Engineering. Prior to joining LCE, Terry’s had a forty-five-year career. We actually talked about that before we started filming. I said thirty-five, and he politely corrected me. It’s actually forty-five. So getting close to fifty. Yes. Thank you, Terry.

2:00
Tara Holwegner: But his career is so impressive because roles that he’s held include a journeyman electrician, maintenance supervisor, PDM leader, SAP superuser, storeroom and work management leader, capital project manager, reliability engineer, you name it, Terry’s done it. And currently, because of that vast and broad experience, Terry serves as an active member of the SMRP Body of Knowledge Committee. So if you see those metric guidelines, Mr. Alexander is on the board that helps define what those are so our community can help explain what good looks like and aspire to be so. So welcome to the podcast, Terry. Thanks for joining me today.

Terry Alexander: Thank you, Tara. It’s good to be with you. It’s great to be with you. And yeah, it seems like I had a jack of all trades through my career. But as I progressed through time, I would get competent at one and pick up another. And I finished my career for the last twenty years as a reliability engineer, so it’s something that I have a lot of background in. And that’s where my heart really works with. I get excited about it. What can I say?

3:00
Tara Holwegner: Yeah, I love that, and I know that LCE’s client partners get to benefit from that passion. And I wanna talk about how this episode connects to some of our past episodes. We’ve talked a lot about maintenance strategy and about reliability, and we’ve talked a little bit about the system that supports all of it, kind of the heart of the data, which is a CMMS, which is your data management system. And I haven’t heard, and you and I talked about this too, Terry, I haven’t heard many people say that they’re completely happy, one hundred percent thrilled about their CMMS and how it’s supporting their organization. It just so often underperforms expectations.

4:00
Tara Holwegner: So I wanna start at the baseline. I wanna start really simple. When you walk into an organization that’s asked us for help, what tells you right away about whether their CMMS is helping them or holding them back?

Terry Alexander: Okay, yeah, thank you, Tara. Again, it’s good to be with you. You know, the CMMS, when it was first introduced, and I’ve been working with computerized maintenance management systems when they were just databases, the one thing that everybody thought the CMMS was going to do was take care of all their problems.

Tara Holwegner: See, now you’re dating yourself against forty-five years.

Terry Alexander: And in reality, it’s how you organize the file cabinet. If it’s not organized correctly and you don’t work with it on a daily basis, you only get out as good as what you put into it. To start out with your question, I think one of the first steps that I take is meeting the person responsible for managing the CMMS and understanding who interacts with it daily.

5:00
Terry Alexander: And typically, it’s the planner. A lot of companies will say the planner really takes care of it. And so that’s where I really like to start. I’ll ask the planner to walk me through the CMMS system, which immediately reveals their skill level and the overall quality of the data being entered. And some tell me that they just got transferred from an operational position and they’re really only learning how to use it, which is a big sign of troubles ahead. And some really do have their act together and can show me what’s going on with the CMMS. So they interact with the process and understand how to use the CMMS program, and that’s a lot of the battle.

6:00
Terry Alexander: From there, I like to review the asset list and the hierarchy. That tells me how well the system is structured and laid out and how complete the asset information is. So if they just have that they have a pump in the system and they don’t have the model number, the manufacturer, the serial number, and the pertinent information around it recorded, then that’s a fail also. I mean, you really want to have a complete database of all the information of the asset that you have in your system. And it’s crucial to have that in order to be able to be efficient.

7:00
Terry Alexander: And so if the pump fails, what do you want to do? Get up and walk two miles to find the pump and write that information down? Or do you want to be at your desk and go click, click, click, and call the vendor and say, hey, model number, serial number, manufacturer number, design specifications, quote it please, and delivery. So all that really matters. And so I look at that structure in the asset list and the hierarchy, how it’s all built, to evaluate how well the system is structured and how complete that asset information is. But most importantly, whether it’s organized for effective maintenance management. And so this review really helps me to determine whether the CMMS is merely being used as a work order and preventive maintenance depository, or if it contains detailed asset information that is needed for meaningful analysis and decision making.

8:00
Tara Holwegner: Right. To drive the business, to drive the performance, or just transactional.

Terry Alexander: So I’ll also assess the planner’s technical competency to identify training needs and understand the quality of job planning activities. And that’s where Life Cycle Engineering, with their planning and scheduling courses that they have offered, is just crucial for a planner to be able to understand what the true planner’s role is and to understand the quality of job planning activities. So together these insights provide a clearer picture of how well the CMMS supports the maintenance operations and where improvements are needed.

Tara Holwegner: I think you just did an excellent job of explaining how the CMMS is a foundational piece to how the plant or the site operates and is a hub for so many different stakeholders in the organization.

9:00
Tara Holwegner: So many different people are touching the system, interacting with the system, and that system needs to work and needs to support the business and support the people who are doing the work in operations, maintenance, and production. So I loved something you said in a recent article. You said the CMMS should be treated as a living document. I want to pull that thread a little bit. What does that mean in practice, and how does that differ from how most organizations perceive the CMMS today?

10:00
Terry Alexander: Well, in reality, a CMMS is a living system and it has to be maintained and interacted with on a daily basis. I’ll ask, for example, when the asset listings, the hierarchy, and the criticality analysis were last reviewed and updated. And the reason why that’s important is because too often I’ll find assets in the CMMS marked as active when the asset is no longer on the production floor. It’s been removed and in some cases scrapped. So this is one of the many reasons why the CMMS needs to be treated as a living document. That means keeping everything up to date, ensuring that, for example with criticality, as you do improvement on assets, other assets may become more critical.

11:00
Terry Alexander: It’s very important to review your criticality of your assets so that you can focus your attention on your bad actors and try to make a better process and ensure that you’re doing the right work at the right time. So its value comes from continuous improvement updates, validation and alignment with the real operating environment. Keeping the CMMS current ensures accurate asset information, reliable maintenance planning, and meaningful performance and cost analysis. It’s really what makes it living, and that living quality allows you to see the actual current activity of your assets.

Tara Holwegner: Yeah, I think that’s really profound. Say you’ve done some capital upgrades or some design changes to a piece of equipment and its criticality just goes through the roof, and you have it in operations, but if you’re not tracking it in your CMMS, you’re gonna miss opportunities for all of the benefits from that asset that you could receive.

12:00
Tara Holwegner: Conversely, you’re wasting time pumping out an annual PM for a piece of equipment you don’t even have. It’s just a waste of time.

Terry Alexander: That’s right. And that’s an excellent point, Tara, because the PMs will get produced for an asset that’s not on the production floor.

Tara Holwegner: And so it’s time and money. I love that about validation with the real operating environment, validation with the health and the state of the asset in its current being. I was thinking of it as, don’t look at your CMMS as an attic. Look at it as the living room. It’s the living document, the living room. It’s not an attic, it’s not for storage. It’s for interaction. It’s for making everything go. So let’s talk about a pain point of many organizations. There’s a lot of fear, a lot of stress around CMMS implementation.

13:00
Tara Holwegner: And you know, a lot of organizations have to go through multiple CMMS implementations. Either their organization changes, the technology doesn’t fit them anymore, they are part of a merger or acquisition and the parent company wants them to use a different CMMS. Whatever the case may be, either it’s a new implementation or it’s a replacement, it causes a lot of stress. And there are some common pitfalls. So where do a lot of these implementations go wrong? What are some of those pitfalls that people encounter when they’re having to implement a CMMS?

14:00
Terry Alexander: This is a great question. This is clearly where LCE can really help organizations because our knowledge of how to build the hierarchy, how to build the structure, how to perform the criticality analysis, all of that and adding structure to your CMMS really matters. A lot of times I’ll take a look at the asset or the hierarchy listing and it’ll be an accounting asset number. So it’s just used basically by accounting for cost-tracking requirements rather than ease of use for the operations and maintenance needs. So not being able to easily find the asset by name or identification number often prevents the maintenance team from effectively assessing the asset, including its condition and understanding the total asset cost.

15:00
Terry Alexander: For example, if the system only displays an accounting asset number, the technicians and the operators have no practical way to easily identify the equipment when searching for information or creating a work order request to the asset. And so that really matters because they’re like, the machine down there that we call the Bindler isn’t working. Well, how do I get that information into a work request in the CMMS? So it really requires a lot of design during the implementation to be able to say, OK, what is the operator’s responsibility? What are the technician’s responsibilities? How will the planners interact?

16:00
Terry Alexander: How will the hierarchy and bill of material builders consistently make sure that everything is done to a standard? So it really requires that structure for everybody. And what Life Cycle Engineering likes to present is a RASI chart, so everybody understands their interaction with the CMMS and what their duties and responsibilities are. So in that case, if a new person comes in, the question you ask during the interview stage for people wanting to come in as a planner, a bill of material creator, or a hierarchy gatekeeper is: will you be able to follow this process? Because this is our standard operating procedure.

17:00
Terry Alexander: And that way they don’t disrupt the actual structure, design, and layout that was put in place when the CMMS was implemented. And if that’s not really followed, like I said about the file cabinet, junk in, junk out.

Tara Holwegner: Right. So for listeners that are not familiar with a RASI chart, what Terry’s talking about is a responsibility matrix that shows who’s responsible for certain tasks, who’s ultimately accountable for those tasks to be completed to a certain standard, who supports the task completion, and who is informed or consulted for the task to be complete. So everybody can see who’s who in the operation, who’s who in the process. And it gives a sense of, you mentioned the gatekeeper. What did you mean when you were talking about a gatekeeper, Terry?

18:00
Terry Alexander: So a gatekeeper is a person who monitors the entire CMMS and ensures integrity of the data going in so that you have integrity of data coming out. And that person kind of has the power to oversee all the steps that are going on, from creating the asset list, building the hierarchy, then attaching the bill of material to each asset, and then determining which parts actually get put in the storeroom or which parts are non-stock. So they actually hold that responsibility. And in one of the many implementations that I’ve been through, I’ve been a gatekeeper. So that means meeting with the people that are going to be involved in it on a daily basis.

19:00
Terry Alexander: I had a meeting with the hierarchy generator and the planners, and we would have a monthly meeting where it would be: here’s the consistencies, here’s where we’re not working together, here’s where we need to pull our lines together, here’s the responsibilities to ensure that that information is going in correctly and being done faithfully and reliably the same way continuously. The CMMS must be structured around the people who use it on a daily basis, maintenance, operations, reliability teams, so they can quickly locate the assets, enter accurate work orders, and view parts and information associated with each asset.

20:00
Terry Alexander: So when your CMMS is built and interacted with as a living document, including usability, it supports accurate data, better decision making, and a clearer understanding of asset health and life cycle costs. Really, making the CMMS intuitive and user friendly for the people who have to use it every day is essential. The easier it is for them to use, the more consistently it will be adopted, reinforcing good data practices and preventing the system from becoming a burden. And that’s what it’s all about. I mean, you really want your technician to be able to go to the computer, type in the equipment number, hit enter, and there the information is. It shouldn’t take any longer than that. If it does, you’re building inefficiency into the process.

21:00
Tara Holwegner: And frustration. You make it sound so simple, and I know it’s not, but when it is user friendly, built around the people that need to use it, with the gatekeepers and information being entered in properly and completely, then it does become easy to use and it becomes a tool.

Terry Alexander: That’s an excellent point. You really want it so, as a maintenance leader, I wanted the technicians to be able to want to use it. So instead of them having to go figure out what the part is, it’s quicker for them to go to the CMMS, type in the asset number, look at the bill of material. And so now they’re not frustrated. They’re not having to wander through the storeroom for parts. What’s better, actually having the part quickly? Yeah, that’s an excellent point.

22:00
Tara Holwegner: Yeah. So let’s talk about how it all fits together because you talked about asset hierarchy, asset criticality, parts, your storeroom, and your bills of materials. Then we’ve got the work to do. So how do all of those pieces fit together to improve planning the work, prioritizing the work, and how ultimately maintaining your assets can serve the operation? How does it all fit together?

23:00
Terry Alexander: So like I was saying, data integrity is critical. Another one of the processes I also evaluate is maintaining that hierarchy and where that responsibility sits. Is it a single person or multiple persons? If it’s the latter, whether a standard exists is crucial. Without clear standards, duplication and inconsistencies can happen. And so if you don’t follow that, the CMMS can quickly become cluttered with duplicate assets, duplicate parts, and misaligned work orders. And now you start really losing the integrity of the information you’re going to get out when you try to build your key performance indicators and metrics for performance analysis and continuous improvement activities.

24:00
Terry Alexander: A well-designed hierarchy, with up-to-date criticality analysis, ensures that maintenance requests, work orders, parts, and historical data all connect to the correct asset. And that’s what really enables accurate analysis, decision making, and prioritization. And I’m going to mention another term: the RIME index, for example. That’s going to give the planner what assets need to be addressed based on the work orders, the criticality, and the lateness of the work order. And so that all connects. And that’s crucial.

25:00
Terry Alexander: This is where Life Cycle Engineering’s work management, materials management, and reliability management processes become essential. Because when we talk about a wave three implementation, we really take an in-depth dive in order to automatically build the processes in place for that CMMS to evolve to a best in class system. Our processes guide how assets are classified, how work is planned, how materials are linked, how reliability data is captured and used. More importantly, the CMMS must be designed so that technicians can clearly understand what’s going on. And then it allows leadership to understand whether the most important assets get maintained, how they get maintained, and when they get maintained versus the run-to-fail assets that can be appropriately managed.

26:00
Tara Holwegner: Yeah, I love that. So the CMMS is the intersection between work management, storeroom and materials management, and reliability engineering data, reflecting and projecting what’s happening on the floor and in operations so you can really measure performance. And to the listeners, we will say the RIME Index is the Ranking Index for Maintenance Expenditures. Basically what it is, is how you determine what maintenance is done on what piece of equipment when. It’s one way to do that based on the criticality of the equipment and what we call a work classification.

27:00
Tara Holwegner: So there are things that Terry was mentioning about how old the work order is, what type of work it is, is it landscaping or painting work or is it something for health, safety, and the environment? So that’s just one of the concepts that we teach in our curriculum, Terry. So thanks for bringing that up. And thanks for letting me show off on some of my maintenance and engineering knowledge.

Terry Alexander: Yeah, and clearly I think all of us on our team, Tara, it’s just built into us, right? And that’s the fun part of my job, that’s why I like it. But like you said, that clear asset naming, accurate bills of materials, and well-organized parts allow the technicians to find the components they need, add them to a work order, and generate a pick list so parts are ready when they arrive at the storeroom.

28:00
Terry Alexander: No more going into the storeroom and wandering around for half an hour. They generate it, they print it to the storeroom, the storeroom clerk gets the part, has it on the counter for them when they arrive. And by the way, the part is dedicated to the asset, so it gets recorded directly to the asset. So you know the actual material costs and they go against the work order, so you can see what your assets are really costing you. And that’s so crucial. And the same structure supports the planners as they build high quality work orders and plan jobs efficiently.

29:00
Terry Alexander: So when hierarchy and criticality and the LCE processes all work together, the CMMS becomes a powerful tool that supports accurate data, efficient maintenance execution, and continuous improvement.

Tara Holwegner: I think you’ve just described what I will call the symphony of proactive CMMS. It’s a symphony. It’s all these moving parts coming together and voila, you have a smooth execution, you have a smooth running facility that people want to use.

Terry Alexander: That people want to use.

Tara Holwegner: And that helps them, makes their lives easier, doesn’t hinder like some of the pitfalls that we were discussing earlier. So let’s talk about how to get there. What does it really take?

30:00
Tara Holwegner: And I know we’ve talked about some of the ingredients, but what does it really take to shift a CMMS from a reactive mess, everybody’s playing off tune, some people don’t even have the right instruments playing at the right time, to a value generating productivity and business support tool? And how can organizations tell if they’re making any progress?

31:00
Terry Alexander: So being one of the few persons, and I hope there are many more, that have gone from an eighty-five percent reactive environment to an eighty-five percent proactive environment, the world changes. Safety improves tenfold. You plan your work, your day is constructed, the technician comes in, knows his work, performs his work safely, goes home safely, and can have a happy work-life balance. And so in that reactive environment where you have to have more crew to cover all that reactivity and you have the safety issues that go along with it, being able to get a hold of that situation and start to understand by using your CMMS where your bad actors are, your top ten, your top twenty-five, and then start to work on them to improve them and get them running reliably is crucial to be able to move from chaos to safety on a daily basis.

32:00
Terry Alexander: And so when I visit clients, I often see planners or work order entry staff just overwhelmed with reactive work requests. As a result, they’re basically just data entry clerks who spend most of their time entering emergency or unplanned work orders instead of performing the best in practice planning activities their role should be intended to support. So many organizations simply just don’t have enough dedicated personnel to manage the CMMS effectively. Life Cycle Engineering has criteria around that. So if a planner is going to plan and schedule, they can probably effectively handle ten to twelve technicians.

33:00
Terry Alexander: If the company actually has a separate scheduler and planner, they can go fifteen to twenty-five technicians depending on the skill of the planner, to be able to do effective planning. When I walk in, I’ll see a planner trying to plan for fifty people. I know right away something’s off. How many people do you plan for? Well, I plan for everybody. How many is that? Well, it’s forty-three people. I know that person just manages on a daily basis. They come in, they manage to get reactive work orders put in. The organization doesn’t understand what the planner should really be doing, what the role of the maintenance supervisor should be, and what the role of the technician should be.

34:00
Terry Alexander: And they go home at the end of the day knowing that they haven’t really gained any ground. And that’s that reactive cycle that really harms asset reliability. And so when that CMMS is understaffed and mismanaged, the quality of the maintenance data suffers. Accurate CMMS data needs to be captured in history. Failure modes and reoccurring issues that affect equipment performance need to be documented accurately so that you can determine what kind of proactive activity has to happen in the PM realm and the predictive realm to ensure that asset is being managed in an efficient manner.

35:00
Terry Alexander: Without that, the organization loses its ability to understand where the reliability problems originate. So analyzing that CMMS data means reviewing the information in the system to collect and evaluate performance, identify patterns, and pinpoint root causes of reliability issues. And that’s the start of being able to say, OK, once I understand where my bad actors are, here’s my plan to start to make those more reliable. As they become more reliable, they fall down off the criticality list where others now flow to the surface, and you can start to ensure those assets are operating reliably.

36:00
Terry Alexander: So when planners are stuck in a reactive cycle, they just become nothing more than a work order inbox instead of a strategic tool for improving asset reliability. And it’s so critical that all that gets addressed, because the technicians get frustrated, the planner gets frustrated, and the maintenance manager’s budget and how to control all those things can be effectively managed by effectively managing your CMMS. That structured approach that I just talked about, with your CMMS data and going from reactive to a proactive state, is about analyzing the data by reviewing work order history to identify trends, corrective repairs, repeat failures, and high frequency tasks.

37:00
Terry Alexander: As well as determining which assets consume most of the labor, parts, and downtime. You have to look at the failure modes by categorizing the failures, the type, the cause, the component on the asset that’s failing, and identifying which ones drive most of your downtime. Again, your bad actors. I’ll also analyze maintenance costs by comparing planned versus unplanned spending. What’s your planned spending and what’s your unplanned spending?

Tara Holwegner: Yeah, how much money are you spending on reactive and emergency work?

Terry Alexander: Excellent. And in our Get Smartr courses, we actually describe that if you run an asset to a reactive state, to a breakdown state, you can increase your cost as much as sixteen times versus doing it in a planned state where it can only cost you a fraction of that, and doing it safely as well.

38:00
Tara Holwegner: Yeah, a sixteenth of it. And if like you said, you went from eighty-five percent reactive to eighty-five percent proactive, and that takes adherence to process.

Terry Alexander: That was over three and a half years. It’s not an overnight process.

Tara Holwegner: Yeah, it’s not gonna happen overnight.

Terry Alexander: And so I’ll analyze those maintenance costs by comparing the planned versus unplanned and where costs are increasing. I’ll look at the effectiveness of the preventive and predictive maintenance to see whether or not they’re completed on time. A lot of times I’ll find PMs not completed on time, and that adds to the reactivity. So it’s really crucial to make sure they’re completed on time and delivering the results they should.

39:00
Terry Alexander: Again, we teach at Life Cycle Engineering that you should have six preventive or predictive activities to find one failure. If you’re doing preventive or predictive activity and you’re not finding that ratio on average, depending on the equipment and the criticality of it, you’re over-PMing. You’re wasting your technicians’ time, sending them out to do work they don’t need to do. And if you don’t analyze where the failures are and what components are failing, you may not even have them looking at the right task on the PM. They may have a component they completely overlook because we haven’t determined that there’s high material movement out of the storeroom on that component.

40:00
Terry Alexander: So it really matters, when you start looking at it, to evaluate that PM and get the step where that component is failing onto the PM. Interact with your technicians to find out: is this step on this PM valid? Well, I look at it and there’s never anything wrong with it. I don’t even know why it’s on the PM because that’s not where this machine breaks down. So you have to be able to optimize your PM and predictive technology plans to ensure that you’re doing the right amount of work at the right time without over-PMing and creating unnecessary spending and higher expenditures.

41:00
Terry Alexander: So it’s really necessary to assess equipment downtime, how often it goes down, the duration of each event, the associated causes, and link them to failure modes, then fill in the PM gaps and operational issues and develop continuous improvement activities. It’s critically important for maintenance operations and management to fully integrate with the CMMS in order to have a best in class maintenance operations team. So that’s why the CMMS is such a critical factor and is just so often overlooked. It was supposed to cure all our problems, but it’s only as good as the data in and the data out.

42:00
Tara Holwegner: But I just want to thank you so much, especially for the answer to this last question, because you went through about five different examples of the richness that can be delivered from analysis of good CMMS data and how it can be used to not only improve downtime issues or bad actor issues in the organizations, but how it can drive the business by making decisions on PM optimization opportunities or accurate maintenance strategy. One thing, I was at a conference and I remember having a conversation with someone about CMMS data, because that’s what you do when you go to an asset reliability and maintenance conference.

43:00
Tara Holwegner: And he was describing how he was a senior planner but they had three different sites and how the three different sites defined and entered corrective maintenance work orders differently for each site, and that some sites were being penalized if they entered corrective maintenance work orders. So they did not code them as corrective maintenance work orders, but decided to code them as something else. And this goes back to that data integrity issue. Leaders need to be very careful how they are using the data and reacting to the data, because you want corrective maintenance orders.

44:00
Tara Holwegner: If you have a predictive or condition-based maintenance program in place, that is the job of those technologies and that data, to surface those opportunities for corrective maintenance to prevent a failure, to prevent a worse failure.

Terry Alexander: You brought to mind, that’s an excellent point. I think it should be your one stop shop, your KPI performance chart. So you look at your reactive plus proactive, you look at your PM completion, your predictive completion, the amount of failures your PMs have found, the amount of failures your predictive technology has found. So now you can start to look at those metrics and those key performance indicators to determine whether or not they’re effective.

45:00
Terry Alexander: And so all that information, just like you said, is so critical to ensure that as a reliability engineer, when I look at that, I can go pull that information out easily and say, OK, we need to optimize your PMs, your predictive program, here’s what’s missing there. Or some I find are very, very good. And a lot of times the predictive program, when done correctly, I’ll find is actually the one thing that’s keeping the assets from going into total meltdown mode. But all that matters so much. And as I go through it, I look at the costing, and I look at the breakdowns, and I look at the work orders. And I find that the PMs are correctly closed out, and that the new ones are regenerated correctly, and all those parts that go into the functioning CMMS. It’s really critical for that asset reliability performance structure.

46:00
Tara Holwegner: Right. You heard it here folks, CMMS matters. That data matters. And we know it because it’s such a pain point for so many organizations. But also, as we just discussed, for the reliability engineer, when you have good CMMS data in, not only can you find opportunities for preventive maintenance optimizations and the like, but also opportunities for capital improvements. If you have the right data in there to get mean time between failure, if you have the right data in there to get mean time to repair, which is about the maintainability of the asset, you may be able to find some really good opportunities for continuous improvement. But you have to get there first.

47:00
Tara Holwegner: Not only that, you can also get on your capital project engineers for not designing in maintainability in your assets and then dropping it off on the maintenance engineers and saying, here you go, here’s your new asset. And then it becomes part of the maintenance budget. Gee, thanks.

Terry Alexander: Well, that’s a valid point. Loaded with inherent problems that you have to solve. And you know, it goes the other way too, because a lot of times when you document that, you’ll be able to tell whether the asset is performing the way it should. And then a lot of times you can go back to the manufacturer and say, hey, we’re not hitting the target design rate per the contract.

Tara Holwegner: Right. So it can even help with your OEMs. And we had another episode where we talk about your OEMs, your equipment manufacturers, as a strategic partner versus just a vendor. So this whole discussion fits in very well.

48:00
Tara Holwegner: And what’s the center of it all? What’s the intersection, what’s the foundation? It’s that CMMS system, which was not a small investment for the organization, but often overlooked in terms of the value that it can bring.

Terry Alexander: That’s a point. I think Life Cycle Engineering calls it RBAM, Reliability Based Asset Management. It takes you through that.

Tara Holwegner: Yeah, risk based. Exactly. And a cost driver, a productivity driver. So gosh, Terry, thank you so much for being with me today and for talking about the landscape of the CMMS, the symphony of the CMMS, and how important it is and how rich of a productivity support and business support system it can be and should be, if you’re disciplined about its use.

Terry Alexander: Yeah, it’s a pleasure being with you too, Tara.

49:00
Tara Holwegner: Absolutely. So we covered a lot of ground. We talked about the importance of treating the CMMS as a living document, a living room, but a well governed system that has roles, responsibilities, principles, and expectations. And we also talked about the importance of an accurate asset hierarchy, of criticality analysis that is kept up to date, of bills of material that are kept up to date, that goes along with that living document. And how important it is for the whole organization to understand that this isn’t just an attic, this isn’t just a dumping ground for work orders or a work order processing system. It can be so much more.

50:00
Tara Holwegner: It can drive the value of your assets. You can understand where your problems are, where you can go fix them, and how you can help not only production but maintenance be successful as an organization. I bet CMMS vendors out there would probably like to have you on their team. But Life Cycle Engineering is lucky that we have Terry Alexander on our team. So I would just like to urge our listeners out there, as you heard from Terry, very passionate about this, but he’s just one of our subject matter experts. And if you’re struggling right now, if your CMMS has become a graveyard or just such a hindrance that it is making you more ineffective and making it harder for you to do your job, give us a call. We can help, right, Terry?

Terry Alexander: Absolutely. Absolutely. We can really help many organizations.

51:00
Tara Holwegner: And we’ve been there, right? We’ve been there and we know what it takes and we can help. Small, large, and in between. So thanks again, listeners. We’ll come at you next time with another episode of Get Smartr. If you’d like to learn more about this episode or get a link to Terry’s most recent published article about CMMS, head to our episode notes and we’ll share some resources for you there. So until next time, my favorite listeners, let’s stay smarter, people.