The strategic goal of any production and utilities department is to maximize production. Machinery and equipment is run continuously, or in batches. The equipment can be complex, as in nuclear reactors, or as simple as lathe machines. The goal to maximize production is determined by the availability of the equipment and its condition.
The strategic goal of the maintenance department servicing production and utilities departments is to ensure the reliability and availability of the machines. The operational goals of the maintenance department require availability and scheduling of employees for work orders, maintaining inventories for the parts, and the analysis of maintenance-related problems.
Equipment maintenance management software helps achieve the strategic and operational goals of a maintenance organization. These software packages are available as stand-alone applications customized for specific requirements, or integrated end-to-end solutions.
At the strategic level, equipment MMS helps top management to make decisions about the purchase of equipment by providing data and analysis of the cost of managing the assets, and by providing data about the vendor and analysis of the equipment provided by various vendors.
At the operations level, equipment MMS helps manage the maintenance schedule of the equipment. The software helps in the preventive and predictive maintenance by analyzing the historic data of the previous maintenance work orders. It also helps decide the availability of the equipment and the duration of the work. An integrated solution helps in optimizing the inventories by determining the parts usage and reorder time.
Equipment MMS is ideally suited for small and medium-sized enterprises for which the entire integrated solutions may be very expensive. The decision to install equipment MMS should be guided by the requirements of the organizations and the features of the software.