In the many years that I have been involved in work and asset management, I have seen a pattern of behavior that is worth examining.
Organizations often find themselves struggling to realize value out of their CMMS and they get frustrated. The beast that is work and asset management always seems to have the upper hand and they decide they need some sort of magical weapon to slay that beast. They need the Infinity Gauntlet from the Marvel Cinematic Universe or one of those magical swords like in the movie Excalibur.
Whatever metaphor you like, they are looking for a silver bullet to kill the big, scary monster and they believe that a new software platform will be that silver bullet for them.
It doesn't seem to matter if their current platform has been the industry leading platform for decades. They decide that that just translates to being stuck in the "old" ways of doing business. It doesn't matter if their current platform is a smaller, more artisanal software solution either. In those cases, the software just isn't sophisticated enough.
If you hit the old interwebs you can always find some new software out there that looks super slick and just HAS to be the answer to all of your prayers. Those youtube videos always look amazing. The smooth-talking sales pitches that show quick montages of screens that they swear eliminate clicks and is super-intuitive even to even the most technologically challenged field staffer are custom designed to make you believe that it just might be the answer to all of your problems.
It is even possible that you have changed softwares in the past. Maybe multiple times. And your work and asset management work may have even improved slightly each time you switched software. So might even feel like changing software platforms does help.
Unfortunately, it wasn't the software that made the improvement. It was simply having to look at the basic building blocks of your system again and doing a slightly better implementation this time around that made an improvement. (You remember those implementations, right? Those implementations that you underfunded and rushed the previous times you did this? The implementations that had you avoiding making necessary decisions because those decisions would put you over budget and crush your chances to complete the project on time?)
So I would suggest that BEFORE you consider a new software platform, you ask yourself what isn't working. The most likely things tend to be:
- Defining your assets
- Navigating your asset hierarchy to find the asset to write a work order against
- Planning and scheduling the work
- Assigning labor to work orders
- Field technicians finding their scheduled work orders
- Creating robust job plans / instructions for PMs or repairs
- Managing work backlogs
- Lack of QA/QC for completed work orders leading to bad or missing data
- Lack of training for system users leading to undocumented work
- Lack of consequences for not documenting work properly
Now I am not saying that a new software with a great phone or tablet based application isn't valuable. And I am not saying that your organization might not benefit from changing software platforms.
But I AM saying that if your work and asset management efforts are being thwarted because your users cannot find an asset, a new software isn't going to fix that. If you are failing to manage the work backlog or failing to properly assign labor to a work order and scheduling a field technician to execute that work order and doing some level of QA/QC to ensure that the work is being documented correctly, these are not software issues.
If you allow the excuse of "it's too many clicks" to stop your efforts, you are doing yourself a disservice and you are throwing away money if you think investing in a new implementation will fix these issues.
In every single CMMS platform you need to generate repair and preventative maintenance work orders. You have to assign that work order to a field person and put it on their schedule. That field technician has to click on their list of work orders, find the work order in question, open that work order, read the instructions, and enter any of the field data required to document that work, charge their time and/or materials, maybe take pictures, add finishing comments, and close the work order.
This ALL takes clicks.
The number of clicks depends on the amount of data you want to collect. If a field technician finds something broken, it will take clicks to navigate to the asset in the asset hierarchy and to create the repair work order. If your asset doesn't exist or if your asset hierarchy is confusing, a new software would simply import your incomplete, trash asset hierarchy.
You COULD do something like put QR or barcodes on the physical assets and scan it with your device to have the software navigate you to the asset, eliminating the searching and clicking. But chances are, your current software can already do this, you have just never invested the time and money to set it up. It is extremely hard to scan a QR code that doesn't physically exist.
So, before you burn another pile of money on that promise of a silver bullet, ask yourself if the problem is the software or is the problem your organization and incomplete implementation.
Watch that sales video VERY closely. Slow down those frames where they are showing the individual screens and you will see something very important. They assume you have all your assets defined and that your asset hierarchy is easy for staff to navigate and understand. They are reliant on your staff having work orders assigned to them and that they can find and access those specific work orders, which requires planning and scheduling to achieve. They also rely on you having detailed work instructions and job plans. The new software platform doesn't magically spawn these fundamental building blocks necessary to function. YOU have to build these foundational pieces of your system. And if you failed to do that with your current software, what are the chances you are going to invest the time and money to do it with the new software?
If you simply focus on fixing the flawed or missing foundational pieces of your current system, fully train your staff, hold them accountable through a real QA/QC process for completed work orders, you will find that your current software really does punch the ticket. It wasn't the monster you thought it was, it was simply a mirror showing us that we were the monster all along. And the only magic we need to slay this monster is doing the necessary, hard work of setting up your system properly.
But, if after all of this you are still absolutely convinced that a really slick piece of software will cure all that ails you, send me an email and I can connect you with a great team that will sell you a software platform that is 100% compatible with my LeanWAM Principle approach to work and asset management.
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