Although results vary from company to company, we’ve been able to help some of our customers save 20% on their yearly maintenance costs when they use our Enterprise Asset Management solution. This obviously represents a huge saving and something we’re very proud of, but do you know how Ultimo does it? Let us show you.
Two Types of Maintenance
There are two distinct types of maintenance costs – reactive and preventative. Reactive is if an asset breaks down or has a failure of some kind, you need maintenance to fix it. Preventative is when you have scheduled maintenance on an asset to make sure it is kept in good condition. Preventive maintenance is in place to reduce, or even, ideally, eliminate reactive maintenance.
Maintenance costs are unavoidable. That’s the cold, hard truth. Either you maintain assets to a schedule, which is an ongoing cost that can be planned for, or you ignore the recommendations from manufacturers, or the signs from your own working environment, and suffer the consequences – reactive maintenance.
You’re never going to eliminate maintenance costs, but just because you can’t eliminate them, doesn’t mean that you can refine and improve them. To do that you need oversight and that’s precisely what Ultimo provides.
Seeing Everything
Budget is one of the key KPIs for any department. Often, much to the annoyance of people working in production environments, it’s given with little more than a “good luck”. With the current financial situation, companies everywhere are trying to find ways to cut costs, and these budgets take the brunt of that.
But doing less maintenance to save on costs is a fallacy. As we’ve said, if you put off preventative maintenance, you’ll pay for reactive maintenance. Not only will that likely be more financially costly, but it’s also much more likely to negatively impact your business operations.
Instead, if you can see trends in maintenance schedules or historical data on asset failure and how that ties to those schedules, you could begin to refine the periods in which you plan maintenance. That would cut down on the immediate costs of maintenance and also unlock the longer-term value of an asset by increasing its uptime.
This is all possible with CMMS Ultimo. Using Intuitive Business Intelligence dashboards, you can follow the depletion of your budgets in real-time and you detect the cost drivers in your organization so you can adjust your maintenance programs. By having technicians work on the go (with an app like Ultimo Go), the input becomes more reliable and a lot of time is saved because the information is available at the right moment. Combined with other smart technologies, like automatically processing meter readings and conditions, you can do more with fewer people because you are doing maintenance at the moment it’s actually needed.
If you remember only one thing about maintenance let it be this: it is unavoidable but if done right, with the right overview and insight, it can give back far more than costs.
Want to get a better grip on your maintenance costs? Ultimo is the way to go.
Other blogs written by Roy van Huffelen
