If you run a company, there’s every chance that you don’t notice the creep of circumstance. The gradual rise in admin, the steady decrease in profits, or the acceleration of staff turnover. Even more so if you are trying to get your company into or through a growth phase. And to the point: sometimes you need to conduct a litmus test to see if it is time for you to rethink how you are doing things. That’s the topic here.

Indeed, that conscious assessment of the status quo is either going to be a deliberate review by management, the result of a consultation (whose commissioning is in itself a sign of proactive thinking), or it needs to be a Eureka moment when something helps the penny drop.

Seeing the wood for the trees

The goal here is to be that Eureka moment by pointing out some symptoms that might signal the time to revise your operations. And in today’s world, such a revision means automation. things that, for the asset-heavy company, come with a CMMS (computerised maintenance management system) or EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) solution. So: do any of these situations sound familiar?

If you operate with a strong dependence on maintenance work, there are certain things you realise are the cornerstone of your business. Maintenance means assets. And assets mean either production, services, or both for the most part. If your machinery fails, you lose money. Either because you can’t produce, or you can’t render the service that machine was bought to help provide. In other words, your investment starts to lose the returns that justified it.

A system that can easily tell you the condition of a machine, what it has cost you, how many you have, and what number of those need work is perfect for avoiding unpleasant surprises, especially with assets that might have a lead time of weeks to months, and you needed them yesterday, not to mention offering proof of work done in warranty claims.

Machines fail through poor design or poor maintenance. If you did your homework, you will have bought reliable, well-designed equipment, so failure is more likely to be through poor maintenance. Maintenance that, ultimately, you are responsible for. Of course, the more a machine works, the sooner it needs a service, so that is a constantly moving target. 

Can you prove your maintenance status?

So the question is, do you know, at the push of a button, if any of your assets need that service? Do you know how long you have before they do, and if they will be offline at the same time or if you can stagger the downtime needed? If not, you need to change how you do things before your current set-up is overwhelmed by an absence on the team or a wave of new orders.

Further potential costs of a machine going down unexpectedly or a poorly followed maintenance schedule are the risk to your warranty. Unlike vehicles that rely on distance travelled, industrial equipment often uses hours run as a metric for maintenance. And if you have problems with a relatively new item, the warranty provider will ask about servicing. Was it on schedule? It was? Prove it. If you lack the paper trail, a manufacturer is perfectly entitled to deny your warranty claim, even if it is not the best example of customer service and retention.

A system in place to make the procedures that protect your employees from harm and protect you from litigation, and loss is clearly something that those who have fallen foul of poor practices or bad luck will wish they’d invested in sooner.

Warranty is one thing, but State inspections are quite another. If your sector requires certifications, then it will require audits too, and if there’s one thing auditors tend to reject, it’s a sticky note with a date as proof of servicing or calibration done. So then, how do you get a solid, irrefutable paper trail?

If it’s not written down, it didn’t happen

The list of potential pitfalls from not being able to prove maintenance status and give confidence to the other party goes on. This includes providing confirmation of works rendered under the terms of a Service Level Agreement, as much as being able to fight your corner in a liability dispute. As an erstwhile colleague once said: if it’s not written down, it didn’t happen.

Having best practices programmed into your SOPs or internal documentation means that omissions can’t happen, not to mention lessons learned become as easy to implement as going into a config menu and adding or revising a step in those best practices.

Is this a Shepherd pitch? Yes and no. Seeing the improvements in results and the reduction in headaches among Shepherd customers who decided to make the change, it’s rather difficult to say that inaction is a viable option. 

That said, there are other EAMs around, so have a look around, by all means. And if you are not interested in adopting NetSuite as your ERP, then Shepherd is definitely not for you. But with that said, and the above now read, we do encourage you to at least consider the benefits of greater efficiency, and reduced expense: we haven’t yet found a customer who thinks that their shift toward 21st century modernity was not a good investment.

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