Preventative maintenance is an important task in a wide range of settings, from factories to offices. To do the job consistently and well, it's common practice for organizations to employ preventative maintenance cmms software. You may wonder though, what features are important for a CMMS. Let's take a look at four features every system ought to have.

Work Order Management

Issuing work orders is the main goal of a CMMS. To this end, you'll need to be able to uniquely identify every job. Likewise, you should be able to note who has been assigned to it, when it has been scheduled, and what notes are necessary for the specific order. The person implementing the order should have access to this information, too. Once a job is completed, the person in the field should be able to check it off and make additional notes as needed.

Asset Tracking

Producing orders for preventative maintenance is one thing. Keeping tabs on all the equipment is quite another. Unique identifiers should be assigned within the database to ensure every machine can be scanned and cataloged. With assets in the database, you'll also be able to pull up information on units that haven't been serviced in a while. It's also a good idea to perform an annual audit of your equipment by hand. This will help you to confirm what's in your database. If items have gone missing or ended up damaged, you can compare them to the maintenance logs to determine what's going on, too.

Inventory Control

To conduct preventative maintenance, it's critical to have an inventory. Just as the equipment should be tracked, so too should the parts. If you're running low on supplies, the issue can be automatically flagged as components go out the door. Operations that want to run lean can even tie their inventory controls to just-in-time fulfillment systems to make sure they're not holding on to massive inventories for no good reason.

Analysis Tools

Spotting trends in the preventative maintenance data can help you get out in front of bigger problems. You might note, for example, that several machines have started to show trouble at the same time. This issue can be traced back to a change in your parts supplier, and you might further determine that a manufacturer has quality control issues. By tracking the data from maintenance efforts, you can rapidly identify and rectify issues before they cost you even more money.