The days are gone when asset-intensive organizations depended on manual processes for day-to-day physical asset management. Automation and digital transformation have been at the forefront of the physical asset management landscape over the past couple of decades, but with that comes the question as to what Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS), Enterprise Asset Management System (EAM) would work the best to improve your asset management process effectiveness. The asset management system landscape is congested with a variety of systems, applications, and technologies. To help cut through the confusion we have developed this blog as an overview that will help you identify what’s out there and what’s best for you. We provide tips on how to wade through the various types of CMMS/EAM software available, explain the common features of different systems in short, plain language, and provide some steps for finding the best system for your business needs. In this blog, you will learn about the following: What is CMMS/EAM? Understanding the differences between EAM and CMMS, what are the benefits of using EAM/CMMS, and how to select a provider for your organization? Key features of enterprise asset management software.
What is a CMMS/EAM System and What are the Differences?
A CMMS (Computerised Maintenance Management System) is an application that collects, organises, and analyses maintenance data. It can be used to manage maintenance activities for one or more facilities and covers the entire lifecycle of a facility’s assets through planning, scheduling, tracking, and reporting. The purpose of a CMMS is to increase productivity and reduce costs associated with the management of assets by providing an enterprise-wide view of all maintenance activities while allowing users to manage those activities in an efficient manner. CMMS is often smaller scale and does not fully encompass the complete asset management process, for the complete capital asset management, the industry employs Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) systems. These systems have the capacity to manage the full scope of asset data and associated work processes, covering interactions between the various business units. Hence, the difference between these two systems essentially lies in their scope: CMMS focuses on managing just the maintenance aspect of an organization’s assets; whereas EAM includes all aspects related to work orders, scheduling, and other business processes as well (including purchasing).
A good CMMS/EAM system can help you:
- Reduce costs through improved asset reliability and availability
- Optimize resource levels based on real-time information about equipment utilization and service levels
- Improve productivity through effective maintenance scheduling and work order backlog management
- Provide a basis for the integration of elements of Asset Performance Management such as condition monitoring and predictive analytics.
Key features of CMMS and EAM
The following are key features of CMMS and EAM:
- The systems are designed to help manage the maintenance, repair, and operations of physical assets. It’s used largely in manufacturing and other industries where there are many machines or vehicles that need to be maintained on a regular basis.
- CMMS and EAM software can help reduce maintenance costs and increase efficiency by automating recurring tasks, streamlining processes, and reducing manual data entry errors. This means it can also save you time so that you can focus more on improving asset performance, reducing downtime, and ensuring compliance with regulations such as ISO 14001 (environmental management) or OHSAS 18001 (occupational health & safety).
- By automating systems like asset maintenance planning/scheduling with features such as work orders; time sheets; inventory management; preventive maintenance checklists with barcode scanning capabilities; approval workflow processes; labor cost tracking reports; equipment tracking reports you will be able to improve safety and security by having reliable visibility into what’s happening throughout your organization at any given time.
How to Choose a CMMS/EAM for your Organization?
The asset management system landscape is complex and confusing because it is changing rapidly, is highly competitive in nature, highly fragmented, very dynamic, and with multiple stakeholders involved. In order to make informed decisions when choosing CMMS/EAM, you need to understand your organization’s business processes and operating context as well as applicable industry standards. This will help you in understanding the best practices for selecting tools that are right for your organization’s needs. Optimal has a number of strategic partnerships with leading CMMS/EAM system providers such as Fluke Reliability, RPM Global, KloudGin, Pragma, Yotta, Assettrac, and many others. We are the specialist enterprise asset management strategy implementation partners who can help you assess your organization’s requirements and select the system that will best address your specific operating context. Through our concept of Servitization, you can gain both of the best worlds – asset management expertise combined with cutting-edge technology designed to address key asset management challenges of optimization of availability and reliability of your assets, managing change and compliance, and balancing risk, cost and performance.
Final Thoughts
If you are looking for a solution that can help manage your assets, improve your operations, and reduce costs, CMMS/EAM can make all of these things possible. If you are looking for something more advanced that will help you meet strategic objectives and make informed decisions based on data, then once again, CMMS/EAM is the ideal solution for you and we can help you on your journey in selecting the system that best meets your requirements and work with you through to implementation and operationalisation of the selected system.
We hope that we’ve given you a good overview of the asset management system landscape. With a good understanding of what your options are, you should be well on your way to making an informed decision about which system is best for your needs. CMMS/EAM systems fall under Deploy stage of our Asset Reliability as a Service (ARaaS) suite of solutions, Optimal through its strategic partnerships has access to a wide range of CMMS/EAM systems that are designed for meeting the requirements of variety of industries. If you have any questions about what systems we have available and how we can help your organisation, get in touch today for more information – enquiries@optimal.world.
