Digitizing equipment maintenance means moving the planning, assignment and recording of maintenance work from paper and spreadsheets into a computerized maintenance management system, or CMMS. The shift matters most for preventive maintenance, the planned cleaning, inspection and lubrication that catches small faults before they become breakdowns.
Corrective maintenance vs preventive maintenance: What's the difference?
Equipment maintenance is essential for any and every organization. Traditionally, corrective maintenance was very common. But, nowadays, organizations have shifted towards preventive maintenance. Let’s distinguish the two:
Corrective maintenance
Corrective maintenance is the process of restoring equipment after unplanned downtime. For example, this includes troubleshooting, readjusting, repairing, realigning, and disassembling equipment. So, if you’ve ever fixed a broken oven, washing machine, or dishwasher, you’ve performed corrective maintenance.
Corrective maintenance occurs when unplanned work takes place to restore equipment back to the required level of performance and it is initiated by unexpected equipment failure. In essence, corrective maintenance is unplanned maintenance and focuses on fixing problems after they occur.
Preventative maintenance
Preventive maintenance is planned maintenance conducted to extend the lifespan of equipment. For example, this includes cleaning, inspections, lubrication, adjustments, repairs, and replacements.
Equipment failure is inevitable. However, by conducting preventive maintenance, you can reduce breakdowns, keep workers safe, and save a lot of money. In essence, preventive maintenance means fixing small problems before they become big ones and focuses on fixing problems before they occur.
5 reasons why you should digitize equipment maintenance
Organizations used to use paperwork and Excel spreadsheets to plan their preventive maintenance tasks. But, this traditional method requires a lot of administrative effort to manually manage and control.
To effectively and efficiently practice preventive maintenance, we recommend digitizing your equipment maintenance with a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS). That being said, let’s get into why you should digitize equipment maintenance.
1. It saves you time
The first reason why you should digitize equipment maintenance is because it saves you a lot of time. Preventive maintenance can be time-consuming and feel overwhelming. Nonetheless, by using the right tools, it can be managed efficiently — this is exactly how digitizing equipment maintenance can help.
Computerized systems ties all aspects of equipment maintenance together, eliminating the need for to enter data in more than once. Therefore, it saves you a lot of time and ensures accuracy. Furthermore, by using an equipment maintenance management app, this helps keep all information in a centralized place. Thus, it saves you a lot of time, again. For example, employees can now access and retrieve the entire work history of a piece of equipment by just scanning a bar code. In the past, this process was done manually on paper or on Excel spreadsheets, consuming a lot of time and effort.
2. It helps streamline maintenance tasks
The second reason why you should digitize equipment maintenance is because it helps streamline your maintenance tasks. By using a CMMS app, you can easily plan, manage, and track equipment maintenance tasks in real-time and all in one place. Additionally, a CMMS app also helps create maintenance checklists for inspections that can be used over and over again.
3. It provides actionable insights, in real-time
The third reason why you should digitize equipment maintenance is because it provides actionable insights, in real-time. You’ll know every aspect of your maintenance tasks in real-time. For example, you’ll know when the task was started and completed, task status, who it was completed by, what tasks still need to be completed, etc. Moreover, by having real-time equipment maintenance information, this gives you a better understanding of when the equipment can operate again, allowing you to make better business decisions of when to receive more parts, and minimizing waste.
4. It improves collaboration
The fourth reason why you should digitize equipment maintenance is because it improves collaboration and teamwork. That is to say, by digitizing equipment maintenance and using a CMMS app:
- Managers and supervisors creates, schedules, and assigns tasks to the right employees
- The right employees acknowledges the tasks, completes them, and updates the information
- Frontline employees identifies anomalies and creates work orders
- Management keeps track of completed maintenance tasks, progress, anything else that requires attention
In sum, it improves collaboration as everyone is involved and is always updated and aware of all equipment maintenance tasks.
5. It saves money
The fifth and final reason why you should digitize equipment maintenance is because it saves you money. Digitizing equipment maintenance ensures that equipment undergoes routine cleanings, inspections, lubrications, servicing, and much more frequently. As a result, this reduces unplanned equipment downtime, minimizes equipment breakdowns, and improves overall equipment performance.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between corrective and preventive maintenance?
Corrective maintenance is the unplanned work done after equipment has already failed: troubleshooting, repairing, realigning or disassembling a machine to get it running again. Preventive maintenance is planned work, such as cleaning, inspection, lubrication, adjustment and scheduled replacement, done to extend equipment life and stop breakdowns before they happen. Failures can never be ruled out, but preventive work reduces them, keeps workers safer and costs less than emergency repair.
What does it mean to digitize equipment maintenance?
It means running maintenance planning, scheduling, work orders and records in a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) instead of on paper forms and spreadsheets. Tasks are created and assigned in the system, technicians complete and update them on a device, and the full history of each machine is stored in one place. Paper and spreadsheets can hold the same information, but keeping them current takes a lot of administrative effort.
How does a CMMS save maintenance time?
By entering each piece of information once and keeping everything in one place. Nobody retypes a paper work order into a spreadsheet, and nobody hunts for the service history of a machine, because a technician can pull it up by scanning a barcode on the equipment. Recurring inspection checklists are built once and reused, and planning the preventive schedule stops being a manual job.
What does real-time maintenance information give a plant?
A current picture of every task: when it was started and finished, who did it, what is still open and what is waiting. That tells production when a machine will be available again, which helps with decisions such as when to order parts, and it cuts the waiting and waste that come from guessing. Supervisors see the state of the whole maintenance workload without walking around asking.
How does digital maintenance improve collaboration?
Everyone involved works from the same live list. Managers and supervisors create, schedule and assign tasks to the right people. Those people acknowledge the work, complete it and update the record. Frontline operators report anomalies they notice and raise work orders themselves. Management tracks progress and sees what still needs attention. Because every update is visible to the whole team, nothing depends on a conversation that only two people heard.
Does digitizing maintenance save money?
Yes, mainly by making preventive work happen on schedule. When cleaning, inspection, lubrication and servicing are planned and tracked in the system, they are done more consistently, so equipment breaks down less often and unplanned downtime falls. Fewer emergency repairs and better equipment performance are where the savings come from, on top of the administrative hours no longer spent managing paper and spreadsheets.
Free for this topic: Autonomous maintenance (CILR) checklist, SMED changeover worksheet, OEE calculator
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