Every year, businesses lose an absolute fortune due to unplanned downtime.
How much? According to a recent article from Forbes, an auto manufacturer will squander roughly $22,000 for every minute that a production line is down! That’s more than 365 dollars per second! With the average manufacturer facing around 800 hours of equipment downtime each year, the industry is bleeding more than $50 billion dollars annually.
In an era of economic anxiety, these numbers look especially frightening. Amid concerns over rising costs, high interest rates, and a potential recession, businesses cannot afford to leave unnecessary expenses like these unaddressed.
Though cutting costs at all costs may look like the quickest way to get out of the red, forward-looking organizations can realize long-term savings by making strategic investments to enhance their maintenance programs. While it will mean paying a fee to a provider, introducing more sophisticated tools for data-driven maintenance can make the department a value driver and an indispensable asset during periods of uncertainty.
Reducing long-term maintenance costs with a CMMS
Today’s maintenance teams face a range of challenges and economic downturns certainly don’t help. Workforce shortages, supply chain disruptions, and aging equipment can go from small issues to huge problems when money is tight and organizations are loath to spend on replacing assets or bringing new talent on board.
Thankfully, leading-edge Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) are making it possible for maintenance teams to work more efficiently. Enabled with the right technology, the department is not merely capable of eliminating short-term expenses but can also safeguard businesses against economic calamity.
Fast facts on CMMS-powered savings
- Businesses saved more than $350 million by minimizing unplanned downtime with Limble in 2023. On average, users see a 30% downtime reduction.
- In 2023, improved resource allocation and automated inventory management strategies helped Limble’s clients save over $50 million on their parts spend.
- Improved scheduling and time management cut down on unexpected overtime and helped Limble customers eliminate almost $800 in excess labor spend.
So how exactly can the right CMMS software deliver these invaluable savings for your business? We’ll explore this question in greater detail below. But first, it’s important to understand just exactly how economic uncertainty can impact your maintenance program.
Economic uncertainty and your maintenance program
The economic landscape is subject to sudden and sometimes unpredictable change. Recent years have seen a global pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and geopolitical tensions all put strain on the business world. Leaders have had to think fast, innovate, and expand their capabilities to manage even their typical workloads.
When businesses hit tough times and try to cut costs, their maintenance teams can face consequences and risks.
- Reduced maintenance budgets as companies spend less on spare parts, tools, and raw materials
- Deferment of capital projects as companies delay equipment upgrades or replacements and keep aging equipment in operation longer
- Workforce reductions through layoffs or hiring freezes, which can leave maintenance teams understaffed and overburdened
- Greater maintenance demands as aging equipment requires more frequent and intensive service to stay in action
- Prioritization of reactive maintenance over preventive strategies, potentially leading to higher long-term costs
Your maintenance team can and should serve as a bulwark against economic uncertainty. In order to fill this role, however, the department needs buy-in from management and the right organizational mindset to secure necessary resources.
The role of maintenance in protecting your business
What’s the key takeaway here? Do not retreat from a strong maintenance program in times of economic uncertainty. Double down on your investment by giving your maintenance team the power to succeed.
Organizations invest millions or more in physical assets like manufacturing equipment, operational facilities, and fleets of vehicles. Facilities managers, reliability engineers, and maintenance technicians work together to keep these assets functioning at peak efficiency, reduce the likelihood of failure, and extend their useful life.
An effective maintenance program should:
- Ensure operational continuity by keeping equipment and facilities in prime working condition
- Optimize asset utilization by reducing the frequency and severity of equipment malfunction or breakdown
- Minimize equipment failures, prevent unplanned downtime, and avoid production failures
- Maximize the productive output of your assets by delaying the need for costly replacements
- Deploy proactive maintenance strategies including regular testing and routine upkeep to offset the need for costly reactive repairs
- Lower utility and fuel costs by ensuring equipment operates more efficiently and consumes less energy
- Reduce risks of accident, injury, regulatory non-compliance, and any associated legal liabilities or financial penalties
The importance of preventive maintenance in uncertain times
Preventive maintenance is a key to achieving cost-efficiency, stability, and resilience–all qualities that can help secure your business against the next economic downturn. But what exactly does preventive maintenance entail?
Preventive maintenance is a proactive asset management strategy that depends on pre-scheduled maintenance activities, routine upkeep, and regular performance monitoring to keep equipment and facilities in optimal working condition.
Preventive maintenance activities will typically include:
- Routine maintenance such as cleaning, calibration, and lubrication
- Scheduled repairs and replacement of aging parts
- Regular maintenance inspections to ensure that equipment is operating safely and in compliance with regulatory requirements
- Performance monitoring and testing to ensure equipment is operating at maximum efficiency
- Integration with inventory management to reduce disruption due to stockouts or stock level discrepancies
Ultimately, these activities are geared toward improving equipment functionality, reducing unplanned downtime, and extending the life of your equipment. Implemented correctly, these activities can result in enormous operational savings for your business.
How can a CMMS make a company more resilient during a recession?
Implementing a preventive maintenance program can be challenging, especially for businesses with a long track record of making repairs on the fly. Organizations making this transition may face internal resistance, cumbersome data migration, and an uphill learning curve.
Fortunately, the right CMMS can dramatically simplify the process.
By digitizing maintenance operations, improving data accessibility, and automating key processes, a CMMS like Limble can help maintenance teams work more proactively, make data-driven decisions, optimize resource allocation, and more. These process improvements can lead to dramatic cost reduction.
Automated preventive maintenance scheduling
A leading-edge CMMS makes it possible to implement a preventive maintenance plan with relative ease. Once implemented, your maintenance management platform can streamline scheduling of regular maintenance tasks based on time, usage metrics, or condition in order to prevent equipment failures and reduce downtime.
The result is a dramatically reduced burden on your maintenance team and less time lost to repairs and downtime. For instance, when Allagash implemented Limble’s platform, the award-winning brewer quickly saw a 40% reduction in unplanned work.
By enabling a shift from reactive to proactive maintenance strategies, Limble’s CMMS helped secure the client’s bottom line against excessive and unexpected maintenance costs.
Integrated predictive maintenance strategies
The newest generation of CMMS solutions is designed to arm your maintenance team with real-time data on the operational condition of your physical assets. Integrate your CMMS with predictive maintenance technology including condition monitoring sensors and IoT (Internet of Things) tools in order to identify discrepancies in the functionality of your equipment and intervene with targeted maintenance before failures can occur.
Midwest Materials–an Ohio-based steel company–reported that before implementing Limble CMMS, they were losing more than $1 million a year in revenue due to unrestrained repairs and equipment downtime. Limble CMMS helped Midwest stop the bleeding by giving the client a closer look at the real-time performance of their equipment to identify opportunities for improvement. The results have included a 78% reduction in purchase order processing time.
Improved resource management
A CMMS helps maintenance teams manage resources more effectively, especially at a time when budgets are tight. Key CMMS features include optimized inventory management with real-time stock level monitoring, location tracking, and automated reorder points.
The result is a streamlined inventory strategy that prevents downtime due to stockouts, counteracts the type of overstocking that can tie up precious capital, and offsets the costs associated with inventory failures.
For instance, Liberty Safe–a top manufacturer of home and gun safes–saw a 75% reduction in the cost of shipping by improving its inventory management.
Enhanced communication and collaboration
A CMMS enhances communication and collaboration among maintenance teams, even in decentralized or remote environments. The ideal CMMS will provide a platform for storing and accessing data on maintenance history, criticality assessments, preventive maintenance schedules, assigned technicians, and much more.
For many businesses, miscommunication and poor access control can create costly inefficiencies. For instance, community health center Family Health La Clinica struggled with internal communication, collaboration, and organization.
To address the problem, the healthcare group implemented Limble and took advantage of features like built-in messaging and notifications. These made it possible to communicate about maintenance tasks, updates, and issues in real time while also enabling employees to share maintenance records, notes, and documents across teams and departments.
The client experienced a 50-60% improvement in time and budget management in just the first 30 days following implementation.
Data-driven decision making
A CMMS provides real-time access to a wealth of important data, enabling more informed decision-making. Limble users can view historical maintenance data, real-time performance data, and predictive data in order to plan maintenance tasks with greater precision and efficiency.
For instance, manufacturer PolyExcel leveraged Limble’s CMMS to get a better handle on its own data and, as a direct result, saw 90% Improvement in Parts Inventory Accuracy as well as a 30% Decrease in Mean Time to Recovery.
By enabling the team to track and report on a variety of important metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Limble provided PolyExcel with the utility to monitor and react to performance issues in real time.
Using a CMMS to prepare your maintenance team for any possibility
The reality is that there is little we can do to predict a recession and even less we can do to prevent it. But we can prepare for it.
And this is why a strong preventive maintenance program is so vital. It’s impossible to overstate the value of a reliable and proactive maintenance team in times of economic uncertainty.
Building a relationship with a CMMS provider today could make the difference in ensuring you outlast competitors, not just surviving but thriving through whatever the future holds.
Ready to talk about how a CMMS can help you stay recession-ready? Schedule a demo to see Limble in action today.
