Shifting Maintenance Perspectives from a Cost Center to a Critical Business Asset
Bryan Christiansen, Founder and CEO, Limble CMMS
Posted 9/17/2024
In many organizations, maintenance departments struggle to secure the resources they need to keep facilities and equipment operational. Business leaders may view maintenance as a cost driver, only investing in it when absolutely necessary, rather than as a strategic business asset capable of providing significant value. This perception leads to underinvestment in maintenance teams, equipment, and processes, resulting in an unfortunate cycle of reactive maintenance work and costly breakdowns.
The key to shifting this perception lies in harnessing data to showcase the benefits of a proactive, data-driven maintenance strategy. By leveraging data, maintenance teams can effectively demonstrate their value and position themselves as indispensable contributors to organizational success.
Harnessing the Power of Data
Maintenance teams often lack accessible, accurate data. Without the proper tools to gather insights into asset health, process efficacy, team productivity, and the department’s broader impact, organizations can find themselves trapped in reactive maintenance patterns. This approach, where investments are made only when something fails, is far costlier than proactive and preventive maintenance strategies and creates a cycle of underinvestment and underperformance.
Maintenance teams should focus on collecting and analyzing data that resonates with decision-makers and aligns with overall business objectives. Instead of focusing solely on maintenance-specific metrics, maintenance teams must translate the data into broader business impacts – potential cost savings from reduced downtime, improved product quality and customer satisfaction, enhanced safety and regulatory compliance, increased equipment lifespan and reduced capital expenditures, and energy efficiency and sustainability improvements. By connecting maintenance activities and needs to key performance indicators that matter to executives, the department can more effectively demonstrate its overall strategic value.
Making the Case for a CMMS
To truly transform maintenance from a cost center to a value driver, maintenance organizations first need the right tools and skills. Implementing a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) is an important early step. A CMMS can provide real-time insights into asset health and maintenance activities, optimize resource allocation, improve overall compliance, and enhance decision-making capabilities across the entire organization. When making the case for a CMMS, it is important to emphasize the new level of visibility it will provide into maintenance operations and how these insights will support overall strategy.
Once approval for implementing a CMMS is secured, it’s crucial that maintenance teams deliver on their promises. Maintenance leaders must do research into user-friendly solutions that will support the team throughout implementation and promote end-user adoption. Low user adoption is one of the top reasons CMMS implementations fail and maintenance teams who are used to being regarded as low-value can’t afford a false start. Teams may consider starting with a preliminary implementation with a small number of critical assets to help smooth the transition. It is essential that the initial implementation and adoption goes smoothly to quickly demonstrate improvements in key metrics and ROI to executives.
With a CMMS successfully in place, maintenance teams will be better positioned to advocate for further initiatives such as new equipment or additional staffing. Teams can use asset histories to make data-driven arguments for equipment replacement or repair and leverage performance data to justify additional hires by showing workload trends, maintenance backlogs, and overtime costs.
Continuous Communication is Key to Shifting Maintenance Perspectives
As business leaders begin to implement these changes, it is vital that maintenance teams continue communicating their successes, rather than waiting for business executives to ask about the department’s performance. By regularly sharing success stories and positive outcomes resulting from proactive maintenance initiatives, maintenance teams are able to showcase their value and how these strategies contribute to overall business growth and success. For example, maintenance teams can provide case studies of prevented failures and the associated cost savings, before-and-after comparisons of equipment reliability and its effect on performance, or general trend analyses showing improvements in key metrics over time. It may even be beneficial to implement a regular Maintenance Impact Report to keep executives constantly informed of the department’s contributions to overall business goals so business leaders understand the impact their investments are making.
In order to truly shift business leaders’ perspective on maintenance, teams must emphasize the need for data-driven insights. By leveraging data and consistently demonstrating their impact on organizational success, maintenance teams can transform their image from cost center to indispensable value driver that contributes to long-term business growth and customer satisfaction.
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