How Maintenance History Can Shape The New Year
By GLEN VENO - Ashcom Technologies, Inc

YOU WANT, HOW MUCH MONEY? If your maintenance operation is based around the calendar year, you may want to consider the following for 2006.

Budget Development
You can’t operate without some sort of budget. Minimally, you need money for labor (employees or contracted services) and materials (items in house that you already own or buying parts and materials next year).

If you run maintenance with or without a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), the issues are very similar. However, if you have a CMMS, budget development may be much easier and the system itself may need some “year end” attention.

So, if you have a computer-based system, you may not need to read this. You already have your budget done, right? And, it was based on the following, right?

REPORTING YOU SHOULD EXPECT FROM YOUR CMMS

Financial reports
Account Summary Report with Year To Date (YTD) totals for each valid account (account numbers and descriptions provided by the Accounting Department), which are arrived at by the CMMS accumulating all Work Order and Purchase Order activity. Sorted by Account Number and totaled at the bottom. This shows you how much money you spent from each bag of money the front office provided access to.

Equipment Cost reports
Equipment Cost Summary reports, with YTD totals for each piece of Equipment that you have done work on during the year. This listing should specify total labor costs (employee and contractor) and total materials costs (from stock or purchased as needed) as well as the combined total. The equipment/assets should be sorted according to the most costly equipment to maintain, to the least costly. The individual totals reflect the cost to maintain those pieces of equipment and the accumulated total should reflect the cost of doing the maintenance work in 2005. Also, the total will not likely match the total of the Account Summary, because it is not likely that all parts and materials purchased throughout the year were used… but, remain in the storeroom/stockroom.

Inventory reports
Inventory Cost Summary report should total how much money you have tied up in repair parts, materials, supplies and spares. This should make up the vast difference between the totals generated for the two preceding reports. Trending the “total” value will provide feedback as to the effectiveness of your efforts to standardized parts/materials, consolidate vendors, control inventory traffic and support a proactive maintenance program (predictive, preventive, TPM, RE, etc).

Failure Analysis reports
Various reports should be available to identify those pieces of equipment that need more maintenance resources and those that require less (so you can appropriately make adjustments to your budget requests, based on facts). Coupled with the Cost to Maintain reports, the CMMS should be able to produce Failure Rate and Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) reports. These reports can identify how often pieces of equipment fail (availability) and how long they’ll run after fixed (dependability). Those pieces of equipment with high maintenance costs, may or may not have high failure rates or short MTBFs. It is also possible to spend too many resources on maintenance efforts that achieve marginal, if any, added benefits.

Manpower projections:
With your preventive maintenance data as a base, the CMMS should be able to project the man-hours of “preventive”/ ”repetitive” work. Coupling this with a projection of the current backlog, the system should be able to reasonably project your workload for 2006.

Materials projections
Assuming that your CMMS has the capability of, and that you have estimated the materials for, ”preventive”/”repetitive” work, the system should also be able to, at least, project the dollar value of pats and materials need for the execution of these tasks.

Outside resources
By analyzing Purchase Orders from 2005, you should be able to determine how much of that manpower and materials had to be obtained “from the outside”.

Armed with this information, and the ability to “drill down” into the work order or purchasing data that forms the foundation of the reports, you should be able to make pretty reliable decisions as to what money you need for what. Just remember those “special projects” and capital improvements. Don’t let them slip a budget by you that includes this kind of work without an account number (and money) that will pay for it. Ask Peter. He’ll pay Paul.

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