Maintenance and production: what interactions are possible thanks to CMMS?

Relationships between maintenance and production departments are not always easy to manage. This situation is very often due to communication problems due to the lack of an effective exchange tool.

CMMS (computer-aided maintenance management) is the main tool of the maintenance department: entry and monitoring of operations, stock management, history, communication, etc. Aimed at placing itself at the heart of information, its relevance and its numerous benefits for the rest of the company and its profitability no longer need to be proven. While it is true that its primary function is to improve the management and planning of maintenance operations, the implementation of such software also concerns your production services: demand management, first-level maintenance, etc. are all subjects associated with production that can be managed in your CMMS software.

A look back at the possibilities offered by a maintenance solution such as Mobility Work and on the consequences of its implementation on the production management of your company.

Maintenance and production: relationships that are too often conflicting between two departments

The two services of production and maintenance, although intrinsically linked, often have difficulties in communicating and in achieving a balanced relationship. Indeed, production evolves in a context of uninterrupted pressure exerted by the search for profitability and productivity and by the expectations of ever more demanding customers, and is causing certain frustrations due to a lack of flexibility in the maintenance department, especially as maintenance is more often considered as a cost center and not as a profit center. For its part, maintenance often no longer knows where to turn and struggles to prioritize the requests that come in. The most frequent criticisms concern in particular the availability, the reactivity, the lack of information or the duration of the intervention time.

Time and communication are thus at the heart of this difficult relationship, which is nevertheless essential for the smooth functioning of the factory. To remedy this situation, it is therefore necessary to use all the tools likely to facilitate exchanges between these two services. Since the aim of CMMS is to be the heart of company information, it is particularly suitable for this function.

All the news relating to current interventions are available from the news feed of the Mobility Work mobile application, available on iOS and Android

Follow-up of maintenance requests through production

Do you need repair, request for improvement of new works or safety on equipment? These various subjects, formerly dealt with in an intervention request book and then sent to the maintenance department, punctuate the daily life of the production manager. However, once these paper requests have been transmitted, how can they be monitored and taken into account by the maintenance department?

This is why it is preferable for the production department to modernize and optimize the management of its requests by formulating them directly in your CMMS software (task creation). Sharing a single communication channel makes it possible to limit communication faults and brings the right information back to the source. The potential benefits are quickly quantifiable: monitoring the status of requests, information on the operation carried out, optimization of the time between the date of the request and the date of completion, etc.

The most common production request validation process is as follows:

• the production technician makes a request to his production manager;
• if it is validated, it is then sent to the maintenance manager;
• the manager makes the decision to carry it out or not, in which case it will be archived and saved in the system, which can be retrieved if necessary (incident, etc.). If it is accepted, it will be transferred to the technician (s) who must intervene, who will then be notified of the presence of a new production request validated by the maintenance manager.

The Mobility Work CMMS software tag system allows you to tag these requests “production request” so that you can quickly find the list. A notion of criticality can also be applied, by creating various tags to define the urgency of the production request, for example: Level 1 Emergency, Level 2 Emergency, Level 3 Emergency, etc. It may also be appropriate to add a tag to identify the department that carried out this request for intervention, for example: CHSCT, Environment, Quality, Security, etc.

Follow the progress of maintenance operations in real time thanks to your CMMS

It is essential for production to be able to monitor the progress of maintenance operations in real time: which technician or service provider has been assigned to this task? What are the deadlines? Is the operation complete, or has it only been taken into account? A collaborative solution inspired by social networks such as Mobility Work makes it possible to solve potential communication faults between production and maintenance, thanks to the news feed.

Available on the web application and mobile (iOS and Android), this dynamic flow fed in real time by technicians makes it possible to report on all maintenance operations carried out. Production technicians have the right to view this news feed, but also to all the rest of the application: research, statistics...

Manage your 1st level maintenance

Finally, to streamline interactions, allow production to quickly solve minor problems and allow the maintenance department to save time on other more technical interventions, it is possible to plan a 1st level maintenance : filter cleaning, visual inspection around the machine, surveys, etc. These interventions, which are slightly or non-technical, can be carried out directly by production technicians and are part of a wider process of transition from curative maintenance to a preventive maintenance.

To do this, simply use the “maintenance plan” function of the Mobility Work next-generation CMMS in order to plan the operations to be carried out by the production technician. In this way, he will be able to access from his phone all the operations he must perform on his machine, which can take the form of a verification checklist or a complete range of photos associated with the task. This approach makes it possible to transmit some responsibility to production operators on their machine while tracking all of these operations in your CMMS software.

Tip: in order to simplify the entry of intervention requests or the carrying out of a first-level maintenance operation, we recommend using QR codes. The production operator does not need to search for his machine or the task he must perform, but can simply scan the QR code of the machine on which the operation or intervention request will be carried out.

Access all documents (photos, videos, etc.) and checklists from the equipment sheet in your Mobility Work application

The emergence of 4.0 CMMS solutions allows the maintenance department to make a rapid, efficient and sustainable transition to digitalization. The benefits are numerous: better responsiveness, improved productivity, improved working conditions for maintenance technicians, and improved relationships with other departments in the company. Production has everything to gain from this integration and even plays a key role in the retrieval of information.

Mobility Work stands out from other CMMS because it defines itself as a maintenance management platform that aims to unlock the information value chain and aims to become the information heart of your company.

Are you interested in maintenance management and want to know more in order to increase your productivity and save money?