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7 Features To Look For When Choosing Maintenance Management Software

January 3, 2023 Business

Maintenance management software can help make your daily business operations as smooth as possible.

Maintenance management software is a platform that can help you meet your objectives while minimizing expenses, improving efficiency, and increasing productivity. With this tool, you’ll be more proactive and less reactive.

Using maintenance management software will help you efficiently and effectively:

  • Manage assets
  • Monitor maintenance
  • Handle inventories and vendors
  • Process work orders
  • Produce reports
  • Track expenses
  • Store crucial documents in a single location

When choosing a maintenance management software solution, look for one that provides consistent work orders and is cloud-based for easy access anytime, anywhere. Also, make sure it’s scalable and has a clean, interactive, and customizable interface.

When it comes to customization, the right solution allows you to pick the best tools for your business and integrate them with the software you’re currently using. If this sounds new to your ears, here’s a quick rundown of the features you should look for in a maintenance management software solution:

1. Preventive Maintenance

Do you still remember the last time your operations had to stop because one of your critical equipment failed? Such problems occur due to poor maintenance practices. Otherwise, you could have replaced the parts that caused the failure.

Preventive maintenance is a feature that prolongs the lifespan of your assets and minimizes your cost of ownership. It automatically generates servicing and inspection schedules to keep your equipment in good condition.

For example, creating servicing schedules for electrical preventive maintenance can help prevent electrical failures that can lead to costly repairs.

This feature also creates status updates automatically to ensure that all your equipment gets serviced and inspected from time to time. With this, you can avoid unnecessary costly repairs and poor customer experiences.

2. Work Order Management

Work order management is an essential feature that can minimize the time spent handling work requests. With this tool, you’ll be able to create work orders and sync them across your devices, from laptops to smartphones to tablets.

Also, it enables automated real-time tracking to keep you updated about the status of your requests. This tool is truly a must-have for many industries today. Nevertheless, you still have to choose the one suitable for your needs.

Look for a maintenance management software solution that offers flexible work order management. It should allow you to create work orders and have them processed, approved, and assigned to the right individuals efficiently.

3. Maintenance Log

A maintenance log is a feature that records all asset maintenance activities. It helps technicians and service agents identify the problem with your assets immediately. With this, they’ll be able to save time and find the right solution for your problems.

Everything that happened, happens, and will happen to your assets must be recorded and stored in your maintenance logs. For example, you need to record when the repair took place and what has been done to repair a particular asset.

4. Maintenance Checklist

Sometimes, service agents are under immense work pressure to the point that they forget to execute the basic operations. This includes creating a maintenance checklist.

Creating a checklist can help your maintenance team to identify all the activities that must be done to keep your assets up and running perfectly. In this way, they won’t be able to forget what processes must be done.

This feature also provides updates about the status of the activities that must be done to help your managers inform all the individuals involved.

5. Inventory Tracking

Several years ago, businesses and other organizations used spreadsheets to track inventory. However, spreadsheets weren’t designed to monitor inventory. As a result, errors and mistakes occurred, causing delays in operations.

For example, suppose you have thousands of inventories on your spreadsheet. But when you count them manually, you might realize that there are only a hundred of them. This is just one of the problems you might encounter when using spreadsheets.

Fortunately, maintenance management software solutions offer inventory tracking features to help you monitor the movement of your stocks. This can help your maintenance teams execute their tasks properly.

This feature automatically tracks your inventory in real-time. It also keeps your maintenance team updated whenever your stocks are low, creates reorder requests, and delivers them to the responsible individual.

6. Reports And Analytics

If you want your business to grow and become better someday, the right maintenance management software must create reports from various data sources. These include maintenance schedules, labor skills, asset history, and work order history.

A report and analytics feature allows you to keep track of your overall company performance, whether it’s growing or otherwise. You can also use this tool to identify which of your assets needs improvement or a replacement.

This feature can also help improve the skills of your maintenance team by pointing out their weakness based on the results gathered from the past month/s. Focus on improving these flaws to help your team work efficiently and productively.

7. Vendor Management

Keeping track of your vendors is one of the most important things you need to do regularly. This is where vendor management comes in.

Vendor management is a must-have feature of reliable maintenance management software. With this tool, you don’t have to send your vendor an email or call them via phone to create a work order.

All you need to do is log in using the credentials provided. This allows the vendor to track your activities, helping them pinpoint the root cause of the issue as soon as possible. It can also track the time spent to complete the work order, giving you an accurate cost computation.

You can also integrate this tool with your work order management to create more streamlined operations.

Final Words

Ultimately, choosing the right maintenance management software solution involves more than inspecting its features. You should also consider asking yourself if you really need all of them.

Keep in mind that not all of these features might be useful in your operations. If you can remove them, do so to reduce the cost you have to pay, especially if the charges are based on customized features.