Effective maintenance relies on diverse skills, strategies, and technologies. Yet, many organizations fail to appreciate the role an aligned and mutually supportive team plays in improved equipment uptime and cost reduction. 

A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) is not solely a planning and scheduling tool. It has an important role in bringing transparency, accountability, and knowledge to maintenance management, and is fundamental to an interdependent, focused, and energized team.

Root causes for lack of cohesion in a maintenance department

There are many, but not all of them are created the same. We cover the two that many problems inside a maintenance department can be tracked down to. Root causes, if you will.

Poor maintenance team dynamics

A role in maintenance is not for the faint of heart. Maintenance staff receives no praise when equipment is running, yet often becomes a target for blame and anger when it stops.

Maintenance personnel live in a world of unrelenting pressure from opposing demands: juggling budgets, operations uptime, and the need to find time for targeted maintenance interventions. Maintenance work is also hard on families, impacting relationships due to repeated callouts at night or on weekends when family events are planned. 

Unsurprisingly, team members can become discouraged without a supportive organization encouraging and assisting the maintenance function. A firefighting mentality develops, with teams and individuals defending themselves against the jibes and attacks of others. 

Friction escalates due to a perceived workload imbalance or favoritism, and people become demotivated. They start turning up to work for a paycheck rather than a passion for their role. 

Maintenance becomes less effective and considerably less efficient. It drives a further deterioration in team dynamics – both inside the team and with other departments like production.

Restricted information flows

When individuals or teams feel they are under attack or talking to people who don’t want to listen, it’s unsurprising that inter and intra-team communication deteriorates, restricting information exchange. 

Management often turns to operations and finance for data on equipment performance given the conflicting or poor upward flow of information from the maintenance department. Maintenance comes to be seen as an extravagant expense without tangible results.

Within the maintenance team, factionalism begins, and information sharing ceases. No longer an aligned team, negative behaviors begin to escalate, making objectivity and supportive behavior difficult. People look to defend their position and hoard information or knowledge.

But not all is doom and gloom. There are ways to deal with all of those issues. 

How CMMS improves team cohesion and performance

One of the biggest advantages of using a cloud-based CMMS software like Limble is its ability to become a centralized digital platform, offering quick access to all of your maintenance data.

1) CMMS ensures one source of truth

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A CMMS solves many issues arising from poor team alignment and communication by creating an empirical, transparent, and objective view of the maintenance function. 

When used correctly, a CMMS provides centralized information upon which all decisions can be made: 

• Management can access dashboards showing KPIs derived from the same data that maintenance managers use to make tactical decisions.
• Reliability and maintenance engineers can measure reliability interventions for their impact against factual historical information and performance baselines. 
• Technicians and mechanics get to see task durations, instructions, and the result of previous maintenance actions. 
• Maintenance managers and supervisors can view technician performance and workloads while gaining insight into training that might be necessary.

2) CMMS enhances independence

The CMMS becomes the central repository of all maintenance data, including access to manuals, inventory information, and maintenance history. 

Such centralization allows team members independence, providing access to current, approved, and pertinent information that enhances their role and makes their daily life significantly easier. Technicians become considerably more autonomous and efficient at an operational level.

3) CMMS improves scheduling and coordination

If there is one thing that disheartens technicians and creates friction, it is poorly planned or scheduled work. Imagine you turn up to complete a task only to find that:

• Spares or consumables are yet to arrive
• Operations are unaware of the requirement 
• You can’t do it by yourself; the assistance of other trades is required
• The task has already been completed 

If this happens regularly, it is bound to create internal dissent, as well as a perception of incompetence and inefficiency.

A CMMS helps automate planning and validate scheduling. It prevents a planned maintenance task from being included in a work pack until all resources are available, allocated, and scheduled. 

Once a task has been completed, it is automatically tagged, and the next-due period is monitored against the applicable maintenance calendar, hour, or cycle constraint.

4) CMMS improves accountability and auditing

A CMMS removes the subjectivity that can arise regarding who did what, when, and why. If a task has been done, it will show who did it, when, and how long it took. 

When used properly, the CMMS can record:

• Which actions have been taken
• Which spare parts were used during maintenance/repair
• Is there any subsequent work arising from the task
• If the task was not completed, the reason why (whether due to operational necessity to cancel the maintenance downtime, personnel unavailability, incorrect or insufficient spares…)

With considerable in-service data and maintenance tasks recorded for review, auditors will have a much easier task at their hand. 

Repeated breaches of schedule compliance are locked into the system, allowing a review of why and what can be done to rectify the issue. Furthermore, a CMMS will also offer insight into resource schedules and break down the frequency and duration of overtime work. 

5) CMMS improves handover and team coordination

Back in the day of manual systems, if there was one area for arguments within a team, it was at shift handover. One team is rushing to go home while the other is getting prepared, making information transfer less than optimal. Throw in factionalism or personality issues, and inefficiency escalates.

While a CMMS doesn’t capture some of the nuances transferred in a good shift handover, it does capture the progress to date, the status of each task, and defects arising from inspections. 

It also highlights who was tasked with specific work for quick follow-up or queries. In an aligned team, comprehensive notes on the work card will capture important contextual information that assists the next team in resuming work with minimal loss of momentum.

6) CMMS reduces firefighting

When an organization is on the back foot with a huge deferred maintenance backlog, it spends more time trying to get on top of breakdowns than carrying out preventative maintenance. It becomes a difficult cycle to break. 

Yet, failing to improve reliability will continue to degrade equipment availability and lifespan, contributing to increased workforce dysfunction, production losses, and cost.

Using a CMMS provides an objective overview of maintenance program performance to pinpoint equipment and systems causing issues. It also shows the extent to which PM tasks are being missed. This allows tactical risk-based decisions on how best to break the cycle.

The empirical information provided by the CMMS supports requests to management for funds, training, asset purchases, new hires, production stoppages, or operational changes aimed at improving equipment reliability. 

7) CMMS improves management insight

A CMMS provides a centralized data repository that reflects actual maintenance conditions and outcomes in near real-time. 

Available to all authorized personnel, it gives managers deeper insight into maintenance performance and maintenance costs. They can analyze data, run scenarios, and track improvement initiatives in real-time from their office. 

It also allows finance to correlate expenditure to spare-part ordering or production to view planned maintenance shuts. The warehouse can identify when kitting tasks should be allocated to store personnel, and maintenance can identify when resources have been received into stock. 

Get back on the right track

Maintenance teams work best when aligned, focused, and supported. While a CMMS can’t replace good management practices, it does break down many of the interfaces, barriers, and subjectivity that create friction and restrict information flows.

A CMMS provides an organization with information availability, transparency, improved control, and greater worker autonomy. It feeds the requirement for data from other departments and forces accountability and responsibility back to where it belongs.

Schedule a demo or start a free trial of Limble CMMS and get your maintenance department back on the right track.