If your maintenance team is spending too much time on paperwork and putting out fires because they don’t have enough time to repair equipment, it’s easy to see why they’re probably not excited about their jobs. No doubt, they’d like to spend more time doing what they know how to do—keeping the equipment up and running. And if you’re a member of senior management, you certainly want the same. This is where a good computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) can come into play. Not only can it free up your maintenance people to do what they’re hired to do, a good CMMS software product can help the team schedule preventive maintenance (PM) and predict when failures will occur in equipment, based on run-time data and any sensory inputs, such as motor or bearing vibration sensors.

Jason Wolfe, assistant maintenance manager at Superior Dairy in Canton, OH,  recognized a need for CMMS to help reduce downtime, manage inventory and PM and track large projects and completion rates for auditors. While his main objective was to create an automated PM program that would ultimately improve machine performance and efficiencies, even more pressing was the need to demonstrate compliance with SQF (Safe Quality Foods) and produce reports that showed attention was not only being paid to equipment repairs, but to food safety as well.