Preventive Maintenance and Inspection with the CMMS System

Paweł Bęś, Logistics and Maintenance Marketing Expert, QRmaint

Posted 6/10/2025

Maintenance expenses often account for a significant portion of an organization’s operating expenses, ranging between 20% and 60%, depending on the specific industry. Despite this substantial financial outlay, strategic optimization of maintenance activities has been a secondary concern for many companies over the past few years. This oversight represents a missed opportunity to improve financial performance and operational efficiency. We can see this directly among our customers, such as DHL, who have implemented the CMMS system.

However, a paradigm shift is now underway with no bit of doubt. All of that is primarily driven by the emergence of new technologies such as computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS). These advanced platforms are revolutionizing how organizations approach asset care, reducing costs by up to 30%. In this article, you’ll learn about the critical role of preventive maintenance and inspection and the core functions of a CMMS. We outline here how their synergistic implementation can unlock significant cost reductions and support a more proactive. Find out more about how to transform maintenance from a reactive workload to a strategic lever is a simple way to reduce cost reduction and increase productivity.

Maintenance Plan and Inspection

Each inspection handbook tells us that this process comes in different forms. It varies in what they focus on, how detailed they are, and how often they occur. Here are the main types:

Visual Checks: These are the most common and involve simply looking at the equipment to confirm it’s present and that any indicators (like lights or gauges) show it’s working. This covers the structural integrity of components subject, device, and machine to the subtle effects of weather, corrosion, and decay. So, visual checks should be carried out using specific site conditions, as calculated in the matrix below.
Pre-Use Checks: Done right before you use a piece of equipment, these ensure it’s functioning correctly for the task at hand. This inspection also evaluates any changes to the equipment’s safety that may have resulted from repairs or the addition or replacement of components.
Accuracy Tests (Calibrations): These are designed to verify that a device measures accurately or operates within the manufacturer’s specifications.
Operations Checks: While less frequent, these are the most important. They thoroughly review the equipment to assess its strength, cleanliness, and overall operability before it’s put to work.

Inspection can also refer to operations checks. This part demands that maintenance personnel are highly familiar with the equipment they inspect. These checks are comprehensive and often involve examining individual components, which can include:

Drivers are the parts that make the equipment move or function, such as power supplies, wheels, gears, pulleys, and handles.
Structure: The main framework of the equipment, like walls, plates, housings, and brackets.
Connectors: What links different parts, including piping, tubing, belts, and chains.
Indicators: Features that provide information, such as ID markings, gauges, buttons, and dials.
Consumables: Materials used during operation, like gas, air, or specific production materials.

CMMS System for Maintenance and Inspection

The future of maintenance is proactive, not reactive. By strategically deploying digital solutions and remote third-party monitoring, companies are gaining insight into the condition of their assets in real time. But this is not the only case.

By implementing automated and dynamic planning, scheduling, dispatching, and routing, coupled with digital instructions in CMMS systems and remote support networks, organizations are seeing a remarkable 20–50% decrease in machine downtime.
Adopting integrated, sensor-based online condition monitoring alongside remote external monitoring leads to a 20–30% reduction in overall maintenance costs.

A modern CMMS system is an indispensable tool for optimizing maintenance and inspection processes, moving beyond basic tracking to provide comprehensive control and efficiency. Here’s how it helps:

Simplifying Work Order Management: Enabling production line workers to easily report issues through user-friendly interfaces, drastically reducing machine downtime. Utilizing PUSH notifications and emails alerts maintenance teams about new problems, ensuring rapid response times.

Optimizing Preventive Maintenance: Facilitating the scheduling and automation of preventive work orders based on calendars or readings. Allowing the creation of checklists for routine inspections and safety checks, with mobile sign-off for audit purposes. Providing a clear graphical schedule to visualize all planned, completed, and overdue preventive tasks.

Boosting Asset Control and Reliability: Utilizing QR codes and barcodes for quick access to machine history, failure reporting, and task handling simplifies asset maintenance. This improves machine and equipment reliability, leading to higher profits, less downtime, and lower failure rates through efficient maintenance management.

Enhancing Inventory Management: Leveraging barcodes and QR codes to simplify and automate the distribution and reception of spare parts. Allowing the setting of minimum stock levels to prevent shortages, thereby reducing downtime.

Improving Communication and Performance Visibility: Offering real-time dashboards (e.g., Dashboard TV) to monitor the status of the machine park and track team productivity.Providing analytical reports and KPI dashboards (e.g., MTBF, MTTR) for informed decision-making and continuous improvement.

Accelerating Response Times: Implementing ANDON-integrated warning systems that can reduce response times by up to 40-50% by instantly notifying maintenance teams of issues on the production floor.

food and beverage industry workers in factory

Conclusion

Maintenance costs, a substantial portion of operating expenses across industries, have historically been overlooked as an area for strategic optimization. However, Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) drives a paradigm shift, transforming maintenance from a reactive burden into a strategic asset. The move towards a digitally empowered, proactive maintenance approach is not just a trend but a necessity for sustainable success, leading to tangible benefits such as reduced machine downtime and significant cost savings.

Paweł Bęś

Paweł Bęś, Logistics and Maintenance Marketing Expert for QRmaint. He is a B2B marketer with 8 years of experience in the logistics industry in the Netherlands. His work included business analysis of distribution and supply chain operations of high-tech companies in EMEA and APAC. He was responsible for directing, coordinating, planning and supervising transportation tasks and internal operations. He is currently responsible for marketing activities at QRmaint, a company that provides CMMS systems for various industries.

Too Small for a CMMS? Think Again

Many smaller companies feel maintenance management software is overkill for their organizations. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, even a one-person maintenance department can reap the benefits of maintenance management software. The same benefits realized by the maintenance crew in larger companies are there for smaller maintenance departments also.

The Role of Information Technology in Plant Reliability

Information technologies (IT), in the context of this paper, include all computer systems and networks, plant automation systems such as distributed control systems and programmable logic controllers, design drawing databases, procedures databases, and diagnostic monitoring systems. The role of information technology is critical for maintenance optimization because it relies on the ability of the plant personnel to bring all data together in a coherent fashion for optimum analysis and decision-making.

The Future of CMMS

We now have the ability to automate many of our standard maintenance processes, analyse in detail various parts of our businesses, and the performance of our equipment. We are able to plan shutdowns, technical change projects and operational maintenance procedures down to a very fine level of detail. As maintenance management generally makes up around 40 - 50 % of operational budgets, the savings made possible from increased efficiency and reduction of waste are staggering.

The 8 Key Elements to Look for in Maintenance Software

Facility management personnel in all industries have waited a long time for computer technology to become applicable and affordable enough to implement in their respective maintenance efforts. In recent years, flexible, dependable and economical computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) have become available to help fight the never-ending struggle to operate and maintain buildings of all shapes, sizes and functions.

Preventive Maintenance and Inspection with the CMMS System