Good evening, SF.

Following our maintenance manager's departure from the company, I've, um, inherited the maintenance department. It's a new challenge, for sure.

I've got a good crew -- two very experienced, and one very willing. We get along great, aside from the "youngster" getting a kick out of scaring people. I've got to put a stop to that.

That said, something I've got to get a MUCH better handle on is our preventive maintenance (PM) system. Currently the system is a very manual system -- one of our techs prints out a monthly PM sheet for each machine and distributes them to a group of binders (each binder covers a portion of the facility). Each tech has an area (and a binder) he's responsible for, filling in the blanks or signoffs on each sheet as applicable.

An audit today revealed that tech A's book is in pretty good shape, aside from the January-April entries, as he was out on leave during that time. Techs B and C each have a stack of empty pages in their books. ¡No bueno! Minor nonconformance, 30 days to fix, so on and so forth. I get to have the "I don't like to fuss but you guys need a solid fussing-at" meeting tomorrow morning. Not looking forward to that.

Having laid that groundwork, I'm back to the point: the current system is very manual, with no built-in accountability. Knowing that the SF membership has a wide variety of experiences (and knowing that a few of us are in manufacturing), I figure someone here has some experience to share.

Who's got experience with any particular PM software? Is any particular system good or terrible? I'm not itchy to get into SAP or some such ginormous (and super-expensive) commercial software, and I need something that's easy to use and audit as well as easy for the techs to use.

Thanks, all.

We use a system from Accruent called TMS. They make several variants of systems. TMS is a little more healthcare oriented, but I think they make some for other uses.

https://www.accruent.com/solutions/all-products

All I can say is stay away from ServiceNow, it's horrible. We have 1000's probably 10 of thousands of assets to track (just at my site), it's slow and cumbersome. Maybe if you had only a few assets and PM schedules it would be more useful.

Dear God, do NOT get tangled up in SAP. I dabbled in the maintenance part of that when I worked at the cannery and it was a freakin' nightmare.

Maybe if you had one guy who understood it and did nothing but sit in front of a computer and work with it all day, every day. Other wise, RUN do not walk away.

It might be easy enough to just set up spreadsheets/calendar.

AKA, some things, like seals, get replaced with time.

Otherwise get replaced based on hours, and there are assorted hour meters available, if you don’t have one built in.

We have a very small operation, though.

I've been using SAP for a couple decades but I'm sure there is stand alone software available. You could create your own in Excel, just for better tracking than paper, but it will take some time. I've even used wall charts just to have a visual at all times of what is done and is not done.

Sounds like you already have a program, just need documentation.
Instead of a binder, post the PM sheet at the machine(s) & have an auditor (you) check weekly. Place them in binder monthly (once verified). lilipop for the good techs, ass kickin' for the ones that don't do paperwork.

Or get SAP so nobody knows if it's actually done or not, but if SAP says it's OK, the auditor won't ding you.

Gotta ask VT. Does it involve food as in food processing?

I'm a maintenance planner at my place. Been there almost 4.5 years and know a little bit about the topic

We use Oracle at work. It works pretty good but that may be a little too much for your needs if you only have a couple people.

Do you have set PM's already in place? Mechanical? Electrical? What are your goals for this system? You could email me if you would like to discuss offline.

Good morning.

Snidera, you're headed in my direction -- we have operator PM sheets at the machines for the daily not-super-technical things (clean up your chips, make sure the air pressure is set right, run a dry cycle and make sure the ram extends all the way, things like that) and then we have maintenance PMs for higher-level, facilities-related things like changing filters on the compressors, checking the air handlers, and things like that.

So that leads to joatmonv's question: no, we're not food-related.

Remsig: thank you. I'll grab a few pages from one of the binders as examples and be in touch.

The goal, basically, is to better document the work we're doing. In our particular case, I wanted to defend the lack of documents by saying "Tech A was out for six months over a shoulder injury. Tech B was essentially an "army of one" between October and April, trying to pick up the slack. And Tech C just joined the crew in July." But none of that justifies that we didn't do what the procedure says we do. All I could offer as evidence of the work having been done was that we had zero major breakdowns over the period being audited. But that still doesn't conform to the procedure we're to uphold.

One of our design guys has offered to write some database-like software to track PMs, and I'll look into that next week. I'm not opposed to custom software, but I have some reservations about it as well.

Long-term, I'd like to get away from the paper records and be able to offer the techs a durable tablet they could take to the machines and record the work right then and there. The end product would include accountability (calendar reminders when machines are due for routine maintenance, plus "overdue" notifications) and reporting capabilities (such as: has Zone 1 been serviced this month? which machines got coolant changes this month? how long ago did we replace the way covers in the Mazak 3?).

Don't buy software that you don't own (I.e. yearly licensing fees), eventually someone will not want to pay for it.

Go electronic with whatever you use, nobody in their right mind is using paper records anymore. It's not the 80's. Electronic records are easy to find, easy to trend from and easy to view when auditors come.

I'd make something in Excel and be done with it. SAP has more capabilities than anything I've seen but has a learning curve and financial impact. Most programs I've seen required the yearly fees and are not worth it long term if your entire company won't be using it.

SAP and Oracle are a big overstep for just this one task unless the rest of the company is operating on either one already.

However, find out what system does your company use for it's accounting, production scheduling, manufacturing, etc. Chances are if your company is already using a computer program for company wide data management, that program has a software suite that would have a preventive maintenance module. If it's different systems, try the one they use for production management.

If your company is really small and the systems are piecemeal, see who does the IT administration in your company (it's usually under accounting if not it's own department), you can just do with a basic database program.

As someone pointed out, you may have already have a program in place. You may just need to learn more about how it works. Contact the software vendor as they usually have subject matter experts available for phone consultation who will know how to accomplish what you need. Otherwise, I think you can accomplish it by exporting the data from whatever program you have and importing it to either a database or Excel if the number of machines you have is not too onerous.

IMO you need to be a pretty sizable organization to justify the complexity and cost of a SAP or Oracle solution.

And you best have your own capable and knowledgeable IT staff, too, because sellers have their best interests at heart, not yours.

I twice had execs override my recommendations/cautions regarding proposed IT solutions. It did not go well, for them, either time

(I got a lot of free "vacation time" in the name of training as a result of one such ill-advised IT "solution.")