Companies taking their first steps toward preventive maintenance often start with homemade maintenance spreadsheets. A maintenance spreadsheet lets you log work orders, document upcoming maintenance cycles, and use filters to manipulate the data and produce lists of work completed. The issue is, spreadsheets don’t talk to each other and can’t send notifications to technicians in the field. This means that maintenance managers and technicians must rely on other systems like email, phone, pagers, offline trackers, or even sticky notes to get a full picture of the work that needs to be done.
While they add more value than just pen and paper, spreadsheets have obvious limitations.
A CMMS and maintenance excel spreadsheets share some basic similarities but are used differently. Below is a table that illustrates some of the differences:
CMMS
Excel
Definition
A CMMS automates the collection and analysis of data to optimize maintenance operations
Maintenance spreadsheets log work orders and document upcoming maintenance
Manipulate data and produce lists of completed work
Disadvantages
It may be more difficult to customizeIt may be susceptible to cyber attacks
Limited access that lives on personal drivesUsually leads to a physical paper trail
Nine advantages of a CMMS over a maintenance spreadsheet
1. Automated preventive maintenance triggers.
Preventive maintenance software helps reduce human error by ensuring PMs are triggered when they are due in compliance with regulatory or manufacturer requirements. A good CMMS system can also activate PMs based on a number of maintenance triggers including time, meter, and event.
2. Auditing and compliance.
A CMMS digitizes your paper trail. Work orders are documented electronically as you go, even if you are working offline. This simplifies things in case of an audit.
3. Analysis and reporting.
A CMMS will report on maintenance key performance indicators (KPIs) such as MTBF, MTTF, and availability with little effort. KPIs are used to evaluate current operations’ effectiveness, make organizational and personnel decisions, and determine whether assets need to be repaired or replaced. Built-in reports enable you to refine maintenance processes and improve asset availability, ultimately improving your bottom line.
4. Access.
Maintenance spreadsheets live on a personal drive on a desktop computer, with limited access. With a cloud-based CMMS, the data is stored on a remote server and can be accessed from anywhere over the internet. Most modern CMMS software also comes with a mobile app so you can access your CMMS via your phone or tablet in the field.
5. Centralization.
Plan, control, forecast, measure performance, evaluate, and report all from one system.
6. Real-time information.
See your organization’s maintenance activities in real-time. Managers can see which assets are offline, who is working on what, and what still needs to be done.
7. Communication.
Work requests submitted into the system can instantly be sent to the correct people. Technicians receive notifications automatically so they know what work is due.
8. Centralized database.
Your CMMS is a database of all equipment information, documents, manuals, schematics and images, and materials. No need for your technicians to carry around bulky schematics or manuals. Over time, this becomes a repository for historical data on your assets, giving you a fuller picture of an asset’s performance.
9. Supply chain management.
A CMMS will automatically track parts inventory, manage suppliers and vendors effortlessly and help you keep inventory costs optimized. When parts are consumed during work orders, the CMMS depletes stock levels in real-time. There’s no need to go back to the desk and update those stock cards. If the stock falls below minimum levels, the system will notify the required users or suppliers to start the reordering process.
Spreadsheets might be cheaper in the short term, but a CMMS will save you costs in the long run
While a maintenance spreadsheet is the cheaper option in the short term, it’s inflexible and doesn’t react to what is going on in your facility. Its ability to minimize the costs associated with downtime, stocking parts, and management reporting time is low, at best.
A CMMS streamlines and automates all of this, and many solutions can be customized to suit your maintenance processes, no matter the size of your organization. Any business can effectively deploy a CMMS in any market sector for efficient asset management.
Switching to new maintenance management software can be a daunting task for so many reasons. There’s always a learning curve, it can be expensive, and there’s no guarantee that everyone in your organization will be on board.
But making the switch doesn’t have to be painful as long as you have the right software provider. At Fiix, we spend a lot of time talking to maintenance managers about why they do and don’t want maintenance software. From those conversations, we’ve collected the four biggest concerns for anyone adopting a CMMS, and paired each concern with solutions and resources to help navigate the transition.
Four barriers to adopting a CMMS and how to overcome them
1. Cost
Budget and cost are the number-one barriers for anyone considering switching to maintenance management software. It’s an investment, no matter which way you cut it. But modern, cloud-based software is far less expensive than on-premise software.
On top of the relatively low cost of the software itself, a CMMS can have a huge impact on your bottom line. It can help turn your maintenance department from a cost center into a value center since the software helps you gather data on assets, and make more educated decisions about where and when to use maintenance resources.
Outlining the financial benefits of maintenance management software helps get buy-in from senior executives. But oftentimes, the people who really see the benefit of maintenance software—the maintenance managers and technicians who use it on a day-to-day basis—don’t have the time to build a really compelling business case.
First and foremost, do your research. You know your company and your maintenance team, so you’re in the best position to choose maintenance management software that will help, not hinder daily operations. Resources like Capterra and G2 are great for comparing different vendors and will help you ensure you get a solution appropriate for your company size and technical know-how.
Luckily, this is an easy problem to solve. We went ahead and created a resource to help you sell maintenance management software to the higher-ups at your organization.
3. Installation and setup
In terms of installation, cloud-based software is relatively straightforward because there’s no on-site installation. Once you buy your software, it’s just a matter of logging in and you’re good to go.
But how easy it is to import assets really depends on your specific maintenance management software. There are a lot of CMMS vendors, and their products run the gamut from very simple to requiring dedicated IT help to set up.
With Fiix, you can easily import existing assets and data from CSV or Excel, which makes setup really straightforward. We also have a huge number of resources to help you navigate the first few days and weeks with your CMMS, including an amazing team of customer success specialists who are here to support you along the way.
Getting the maintenance team on board
You can’t just drop new software on your maintenance team and expect them to adapt. Bad change management can lead to resistance, which can delay or even halt software implementation.
We’ve addressed this particular challenge before. Basically, there are three simple ways to help manage resistance to change which are detailed below:
Keep your people informed throughout the process. No one likes being told things are changing once the ball is already rolling. Get input from your maintenance team right from the start, so you can get a CMMS with features that bolster your team’s productivity. Be sure to stress that it’s mostly business as usual, and be clear about what parts of the routine will change to help people adjust to the transition.
Be specific about the benefits of maintenance management software. A CMMS can have a huge, positive impact on the day-to-day job of maintenance technicians and on how your facility runs as a whole.
Never skip training. There is nothing as good as hands-on experience to help a new system seem a lot less daunting. Check out our training page and support center to see what kind of support we offer both during and after implementation.
Although there are barriers to adopting maintenance software, they’re well worth facing for the long-term value the software adds to your team
Although there may be a bit of a learning curve when it comes to implementing maintenance software, the long-term value for your organization is unmatched. Purchasing a CMMS for example can result in fewer equipment breakdowns, longer asset life, better compliance standards, and much more.
Your organization’s underlying business processes are a critical cog in building a customer-centric and digital ecosystem. Therefore, these processes must be correctly modeled, mapped, optimized, and automated, to generate greater value for the customer. To make this happen, process modeling software can help. The software will set a strong start to your process optimization, making it easier to streamline processes while eliminating bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
Process modeling is a technique that uses a graphical representation to map out your organizational business processes. It uses a web-based, drag-and-drop process modeler tool to design simple and complex business processes.
Similar to a flow chart, a process modeler outlines individual steps of a process to give a holistic view of tasks in the process cycle. The modeling software allows you to represent processes in a way that can be transformed into a live automated process. It is an essential component for effective business process management and automation.
Benefits of Process Modeling Software
Listed here are some benefits of implementing process modeling software:
Process improvement and agility: By visualizing the business process mapped, you get a clear picture of how each process works in the current state and constantly improve them
Business orchestration and efficiency: Process modeler contributes towards enhancing the efficiency of your business processes, supports increased collaboration amongst users and systems
Standardization across departments: In cases where multiple processes in an organization involve similar steps or repetitive tasks, a process modeler allows to identify best practices across functions and implement procedures in a seamless manner, thereby ensuring consistency and standardization
Competitive differentiation: An organization that has aligned its operations with its strategy, is adaptable and nimble, has control over its processes, and works smoothly is much more likely to deliver transformed and differentiated experiences, thereby gaining a competitive advantage
In a nutshell, process modeling helps you continuously improve processes with a systematic approach and facilitate periodic testing of the waters for course adjustment.
Customers Globally Achieved Cost Savings and Business Benefits, Finds an Independent Research
According to Deloitte, “While 85% of CEOs accelerated digital initiatives during the pandemic, most can’t articulate their overall strategy and progress beyond that they made a tech investment.” Realizing the emerging needs and goals of organizations, Newgen provides and continuously upgrades its low code and cloud-based digital transformation platform, NewgenONE, to help organizations across industries accelerate their digital transformation journeys.
The Total Economic Impact™ of Newgen Software, a Forrester Consulting Study Recently, Newgen commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying its solutions in digital transformation. The study provides readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Newgen on their organizations. Forrester interviewed three decision-makers with experience using Newgen Software to better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with the investment.
The study found that Newgen provided a 371% ROI and a $29M NPV for a composite organization over three years with a payback period of less than six months. The study further described how a composite organization experienced improvements in areas like employee productivity, workflow efficiency, customer experience, and regulatory compliance, leading to significant cost savings and business benefits after deploying Newgen’s solutions for digital transformation.
Key Benefits Unlocked with Newgen
Here are some of the key benefits that the composite organization experienced after investing in Newgen’s solutions:
Improved Productivity with Automated Enrolment and Data Entry
The interviewed organizations were able to eliminate mundane, manual data entry processes using Newgen solution features such as auto-extraction, auto-validation, and single-screen data entry. This helped organizations reduce errors and accelerate the enrolment process. Digitizing manual data entry allowed interviewed organizations to reskill between 8% and 20% of FTEs per year and enabled 50% in time savings.
Accelerated Delivery with Workflows Digitization in the Call Center
Investing in Newgen’s solutions helped enhance the agent’s visibility on key processes through Newgen’s unified dashboard. The dashboard offers capabilities to centralize repository for archiving all contract documents, streamline the approval and review process, and leverage intelligent automation and AI capabilities to better inform the agent’s decision-making. Furthermore, agents were able to reduce the average time spent on handling customer queries like appeals and grievances by 75% after streamlining and automating various processes.
Operational Cost Savings from Decommissioned IT Systems
Newgen’s solutions allowed interviewed organizations to simplify their complex business needs and workflows supporting them. The organizations were able to leverage a singular cloud-based platform that integrated multiple processes and disparate IT systems. This helped organizations to decommission legacy IT systems and bridge information silos, unlock simpler processes, and improve productivity. Repurposing the resources dedicated to maintenance, patching, and IT support per decommissioned system helped cut operational costs.
Faster Invoice Processing
Invoices processing can be complex, as one of the interviewed organizations reported several challenges in processing invoices efficiently, which resulted in a lack of visibility into cash flow. The organization found a solution in Newgen’s cloud-based digital transformation platform to tackle the issues like dependency on multiple systems, delayed payments, and lost invoices. After investing in Newgen’s solutions, the organization was able to handle invoice processing from initiation to archival. Standardizing and automating invoice processing helped the organization accelerate the process by 60%– from an average of 5 to 2 days.
Enhanced Customer and Employee Experience
After deploying Newgen’s solutions for digital transformation, the composite organization saw an improvement in its customer and employee experience. The organization could enhance its customer experience by leveraging an integrated customer portal for accessing communication materials and self-service tools in a timely manner. Furthermore, Newgen’s intelligent automation capabilities reduced the volume of manual paperwork, freeing up the organization’s capacity to upskill and fulfill greater responsibilities, enhancing the employee experience and satisfaction.
Better Adherence to Regulatory Compliance
With Newgen’s solutions, the composite organization could comply more fastidiously by virtue of its capacity to prioritize transactions relative to the financial and regulatory risks they pose. Thus, enabling the organization to address those risks in advance and avoid any regulatory fines on account of delayed processing.
Quicker Provider Onboarding and Contracting
By deploying Newgen’s solutions, interviewed organizations were able to accelerate their provider onboarding and contracting processes. The organizations could tap on intelligent features such as the auto-generation of letters which enabled them to accelerate turnaround time to onboard providers from weeks to days, elevating the overall experience and level of provider satisfaction.
Apart from these quantified and unquantified benefits, the study also highlights the analysis of each benefit, cost analysis, and financial summary of the entire study based on the composite organization.
Metadata, by its definition, tells more about other data. It gives common “keys” to finding information based on what it is, rather than where it is located.
With metadata, information can be categorized in a common, efficient way, so that everyone has access to it. Metadata, while already providing a lot of benefits for the organization, is still only one step on the path towards improved profitability.
To efficiently manage all organizational data, you need a method of finding, identifying, managing and processing information regardless of its location. You need connectors to access data in other repositories and intelligent tools to find and manage the information you need.
Webopedia explains intelligent information management as a set of processes and underlying technology solutions that enable organizations to understand, organize and manage all sorts of datatypes.
Intelligent information management comes from a metadata-driven approach to document management combined with the ability to manage information across systems and repositories without the need for migration. Additionally, AI is part of the package to help automate the related processes.
Information management is key to achieving both more profitability and compliance with laws and regulations. Intelligent information management provides transparency to workflows and helps you adhere to compliance requirements more easily.
As the name suggests, content classification classifies structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents based on layout, content, and object-based type.
Incoming documents come in various types, including application forms, claim forms, invoices, identity proofs, etc. In a manual setup, employees are required to open documents, skim through them, and classify them, which is not a very effective technique. Here’s when an intelligent content classifier comes into the picture. It enables enterprises to classify documents and organize information quickly and easily. It provides valuable information that can be leveraged to understand the trend and gain meaningful insights.
What are the facilitators for intelligent content classification?
It classifies documents by determining the physical layout of the document against pre-trained layouts.
Content-based classification
It reads the content from semi-structured and unstructured documents, matches them to stored keywords, and identifies the correct classifier accordingly
Object-based classification
It reads the various images, logos, etc., on a document and matches pre-determined patterns like recognizing a driving license.
What are the capabilities of Content Classification?
Assigning each document to a class based on the content and visual classification
Model training studio to learn about new content types for classification and metadata extraction
Easily integrate with core business applications, content management platforms, and document capture applications
Auto segregation capability to automatically identify the first and last pages in batch documents
Capability to import a large volume of documents and assign classes to each document
Robust document classification capability – Irrespective of language, OCR quality, color depth, skewed layout
Multilingual document classification – Irrespective of the language used in the document, a trained model of content-based classifier classifies the documents
Key-takeaways
Content classification system simplifies document management, reduces operational costs, and increases employees’ productivity. Content classification software is an essential capability of contextual content service platforms.
Newgen has been recognized in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Content Services Platforms. Are your documents slowing you down? Read this eBook to know how a contextual content service platform can help you streamline your documents and ensure business continuity.
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