On the surface, running a sustainable operation is about minimizing your environmental impact, lowering your carbon footprint, and reducing your energy consumption. But to be truly sustainable, businesses must also improve efficiency, manage costs, and reduce waste of all kinds. A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) can help your business achieve all of the above.
Maintenance programs play a vital role in helping businesses achieve greater sustainability. We’ll identify the key CMMS features that can help. But first, let’s take a closer look at why sustainability is so important for the overall success of your business.
Why sustainability is important for your business
Whether motivated by economic, moral, or public relations factors, sustainability is important first and foremost because it is incumbent on all of us to reduce the environmental impact of our actions. All businesses leave some carbon footprint. This is especially true for big companies that operate multiple facilities, across broad geographical expanses, with large asset portfolios that include vehicle fleets, heavy machinery, and complex infrastructures.
The objective is to lower that carbon footprint by taking steps to improve operational efficiency, prevent wastefulness, reduce fuel consumption, lower emissions, and find ways to add less tonnage to the world’s landfills.
There are some very clear business imperatives for improving sustainability including:
- Improved compliance with increasingly stringent and detailed environmental regulations
- Significant cost savings as a result of reduced waste, lower fuel costs, and more efficient asset utilization
- Longer asset lifespan for and less frequent replacement of costly equipment
- Positive brand recognition among consumers and investors, both of whom are increasingly attracted to companies with strong sustainability practices
- Greater long-term viability in a future that may be shaped by resource scarcity and supply chain disruption
What is sustainable maintenance?
Sustainable maintenance is the systematic approach of preserving and optimizing assets while minimizing the environmental impact of their operation.
Fortunately, many of the same strategies that contribute to effective maintenance can also directly improve the sustainability of your operation. Sustainable maintenance strategies combine practices aimed at extending the lifespan of equipment and preventing unplanned downtime, with practices that reduce energy consumption, resource depletion, and waste. An effective preventive maintenance strategy will help your business achieve all of these outcomes.
The role of maintenance in an organization’s sustainability efforts
Your maintenance program plays a central role in helping your business achieve sustainability. Preventive maintenance strategies like routine servicing, regular inspections, real-time condition monitoring, and streamlined inventory management can help improve the operational efficiency of your machinery, reduce the production of waste, and extend the lifecycle of your critical assets.
There are a few key benefits of proactive maintenance that also contribute directly to greener and more sustainable operations:
- Reducing energy consumption by optimizing equipment performance
- Lowering energy waste by preventing asset malfunction, equipment failure, or prolonged downtime
- Preventing materials waste by improving process efficiency, reducing the occurrence of defective products, and shrinking the amount of excess material or byproduct created by the production process
- Enhancing conservation by preventing leaks and spills, reducing the environmental impact associated with material disposal and exposure
- Extending the asset lifespan, reducing the impact of disposal and the frequency of equipment replacements that require extensive resources to manufacture, ship, and install new assets
- Ensuring compliance with environmental regulations, reducing the risk of financial penalties and promoting a stronger reputation for corporate social responsibility (CSR)
How to implement a sustainable maintenance program
In the section below, we identify a few best practices that your maintenance program can adopt in order to become a little more green.
- Promote a culture of sustainability: Effectively communicate the importance of sustainability initiatives to your maintenance technicians, and ensure your maintenance managers and facilities managers lead by example.
- Train maintenance teams: Outline sustainability practices in your standard operating procedures and educate personnel on key sustainability goals, practices, and resource utilization protocols.
- Schedule maintenance carefully: Schedule preventive maintenance tasks based on predefined triggers like timed intervals, usage, or seasonality.
- Upgrade to energy-efficient equipment: Ensure that your maintenance team is up-to-speed on the operation, upkeep and repair of assets with the most current technology.
- Use eco-friendly materials: Include sustainable lubricants, cleaners, and other raw materials in your supply inventories to reduce the environmental impact of maintenance activities.
- Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs): Track metrics related to equipment efficiency, downtime, and resource use to identify areas for improvement.
- Use predictive maintenance strategies: Combine advanced data analytics and IoT sensors to monitor equipment condition in real time, predict failures before they occur, and intervene only when necessary.
- Implement a CMMS: A CMMS streamlines, simplifies, and automates aspects of your preventive maintenance program to ensure optimal equipment performance, maximum energy efficiency, fully integrated inventory management, and more.
The role of CMMS software in sustainable maintenance
Perhaps most critical step a maintenance team can take to reduce its environmental impact is to implement a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS). This is because the right CMMS solution can help, measure, monitor, and facilitate greater efficiency in most maintenance activities.
A CMMS is a software solution designed to streamline maintenance management, improve operational efficiency, and optimize resource allocation through an array of preventive maintenance strategies. In doing so, the right CMMS can also empower your maintenance team to improve your company’s environmental performance.
Here are a few ways a CMMS can help your company implement, exercise, and improve your sustainable maintenance program.
Better preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance can not only reduce unplanned downtime, but it can also ensure that your equipment is operating at peak energy efficiency, that you’re maintenance team is preserving resources by lowering the frequency and severity of repairs, and that you are maximizing the expected lifespan of your equipment. A CMMS can provide automated preventive maintenance scheduling, work order management, and usage tracking, ensuring your PM program is executed effectively.
Effective inventory management
Managing an inventory of spare parts well is crucial for sustainable maintenance. A CMMS helps organizations track their inventory, manage stock levels, and minimize waste by providing real-time visibility into inventory levels and usage patterns. It also facilitates just-in-time (JIT) ordering practices and streamlines procurement workflows and approvals.
Compliance with environmental regulations
A solid plan for ensuring and documenting compliance with regulations is a crucial aspect of sustainable maintenance. A CMMS can simplify auditing processes, making it easier for organizations to adhere to regulatory standards through detailed documentation, proactive internal inspections, comprehensive audit trails, and improved reporting.
Condition monitoring
Sensors and IoT monitoring devices connected and integrated with a CMMS make it possible to track equipment performance in real-time and intervene when data suggests inefficient energy consumption, lagging performance, usage issues, or impending malfunctions or breakdowns. A leading CMMS will integrate with condition monitoring sensors to arm maintenance personnel with a wide range of useful data to make maintenance planning more precise and less wasteful.
Leveraging big data
CMMS reports and dashboards help maintenance teams implement predictive maintenance strategies, identify process inefficiencies, and prioritize preventive maintenance tasks based on factors such as asset criticality, technician schedules, and resource availability. A CMMS should provide customizable metrics for tracking sustainability, efficiency, and equipment performance, as well as improve your maintenance team’s ability to make informed decisions about your sustainability practices.
How to leverage your CMMS for sustainable maintenance
A CMMS is a powerful resource for implementing a sustainable maintenance program. And the right CMMS can automate a number of important parts, like preventive maintenance scheduling, work order generation, and spare parts procurement. However, transforming your maintenance department into a sustainable maintenance program is not automatic.
There are steps you must take in order to maximize the sustainability potential that comes with your CMMS. Here are some of the essential steps for implementing a CMMS with a focus on sustainable maintenance.
- Assess your current maintenance practices and sustainability goals: Identify existing gaps between your goal state and current state and spotlight opportunities for improvement so that you can tailor your CMMS to meet specific sustainability needs and thresholds.
- Compile a comprehensive asset inventory: Include details on each asset type, manufacturer or OEM, model, installation date, criticality, maintenance history, dates of operation, and warranty information, as this information will be essential to identifying opportunities for efficiency upgrades and process improvements.
- Select the right CMMS: Make sure your software aligns with your organization’s sustainability objectives, prioritizing features like preventive maintenance scheduling, inventory management, compliance tracking, and reporting capabilities. LIkewise, prioritize a CMMS with scalability that can adapt as your organization grows in size and complexity and as environmental standards evolve.
- Train maintenance personnel: Build sustainability practices into your maintenance training program to ensure successful adoption of the CMMS and sustainability initiatives. Providing key stakeholders and end users with consistent and useful information will encourage adoption and reduce resistance.
- Pursue continuous improvement: Useyour CMMS to conduct regular reviews of protocols and procedures to help identify areas for improvement. Tracking key maintenance metrics related to efficiency, energy usage, and waste reduction helps you make data-driven decisions to enhance your program.
- Encourage internal feedback: A CMMS provides a central repository of information and communication between teams that can incorporate the experiences and insights of maintenance personnel into future practices and procedures.
Using Limble to implement your sustainable maintenance program
Limble’s industry-leading CMMS brings together the advanced features and the adaptability required to help your maintenance program achieve sustainability and continue to adapts as environmental rules, regulations, and customer expectations evolve.
To learn more about how CMMS software can help your business become more sustainable and more profitable, download our completely free CMMS Buyer’s Guide.
