How to use your CMMS to leverage the “Big Data” in it.

Optimizing asset value and reliability is a mission-critical goal for businesses and
government. From the board room to the shop floor - it is a goal that transcends
department and office siloes. Our collective stakeholders have asked us to do more with
less, providing them with quantifiable value. Since I do not see this changing going
forward, the question is how to accomplish this. One of the most effective ways is
through leveraging the data that we produce as well as improving the quality of that
data.

We create data at each transaction in our CMMS. Improving this data is more about
changing the way people look it than changing how it is generated. These transactions
are what create the “big data” that everyone craves: we produce it as a matter of fact in
maintenance, from closing comments, parts used, failure modes, failure components,
down time, services used, supplies consumed, PO’s issued and hours spent doing the
work. All of that data is generated on the first corrective work order it; it gets even
bigger when you have rework or follow up work to do. At a wastewater recovery facility,
we collect data on the assets in our systems such as run time, time between maintenance,
rate of operation, monitoring parameters such as temperature, pressure, vibration, fuel
usage, energy usage, and. On a monthly basis we create over 4800 work orders and each
one produces multiple data points, which add up quickly. This is done through our
Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) or Enterprise Asset
Management System (EAM).

What is your CMMS/EAM system to you? Is it just a work management system, a

Purchase Order System, or a necessary evil imposed on you by someone else? What
should it be?

I propose that it needs to be your “system of record” for your assets, in other words, your
asset “data warehouse”. Every asset in your system has a history, but it likely resides in
a log book somewhere, or spread across a bunch of workers’ personal notebooks, or –
even more challenging - in the employees’ heads. Do you have access to it now for
future work, or do you have to continuously have to go back and recreate the past?

When we have people that have been in our plants for 30+ years retire that have been
devoted to the care of our assets for the life of their careers, we lose all that history that is
not recorded elsewhere. It has been my experience that these dedicated people have
recorded history in log books, equipment books, note books, in work order history or on
simple sheets attached to the inside covers of equipment. They knew they needed to
know what was done and when it was done on with each asset and recorded it the best
they could without a formal system in place. We need to own that formal system and get
as much into it as we can, or else we are working against ourselves. In many instances
we have inherited the systems we’ve got – primitive as they may be.
To develop a systematized data collection system, you need to look at who designed your
CMMS/EAM, who implemented it, what were their objectives, do they still match how
you want to use it, how was it supposed to be used, what do you use it for now, where do
you keep your equipment history, where is your cost data, who can see what is in your
system, do your field definitions match how you use them, where do you get the data
from, who uses that data and for what? As a Maintenance Department or and Asset
Management Department we need to realize that we have customers for what we have in
our CMMS/EAM systems. I would suggest to you that not many of us are servicing that
customer very well, and this is one way to do it better
With each transaction in the CMMS/EAM system, from work identification to correction
actions, from PM plan to execution, from part identification to purchase, from data
logging and trending we create the data in the system that is used by others. But have we
put in place policies that help keep this data useful, complete and up-to-date? Most of us
give little or no though to the policy side of maintenance. Many of us come from hands-
on back ground and are more interested in doing the work - not writing about how to
account for it! My passion does not lay in policy either, but understanding how important
it is helps me understand how to focus on getting better at serving my data customers.

So, do we need heavy handed polices that require multiple fields in the CMMS/EAM, or
do we just need to create the awareness that the data is important, and useful? Perhaps
you know some maintenance people who do not believe that anyone ever looks at their
inputs. That may have been the case in the past when it was all on paper and it took a
lot of work to sift through it, but now with electronic systems, sorting is fast and data can
be at one’s fingertips in seconds! . Now data can be reviewed when you have a failure
on an asset, or when an external customer has a need. So who are these customers I keep
talking about outside our departments?

Here is a list of who is an external customer of our data; your list may be shorter or
longer,
• Accounting/Finance – adjusts period costs, sets annual budgets
• Accounts receivable – adjusts billing costs to our client
• Accounts payable – holds payment until work is completed satisfactory
• Corporate Sourcing – how much and what do we need to by so that they can
negotiate better pricing structure
• Purchasing – who and where do we buy from, are we getting the lowest
responsible cost, are we following policy, meeting goals
• Client’s – used to drive capital, rate structures, budgets and a whole lot more
• Business development – helps calibrate their cost models of future bids
• Safety/Environment – looks at hazardous material usage, failure rates of safety
systems, compliance with permits, JSA’s, LOTO’s audits and lots of other stuff
• HR – looks at job assignments to help with job descriptions, looks at work break
down to help staffing and contract negotiations
• IT – looks at installed appliances to mitigate obsolescence of hardware
• Training – looks at failure history to identify weakness in skills that can be
improved
• Sustainability – looks at opportunities to reduce resource usage

How clean is your data? Can others use it? Can you use your own data to improve, or
do you need to cipher through it all. To do more with less – and to withstand the scrutiny
that budgets and expenditures receive - we need to know how our resources are being
spent.

Many of us have turned to a CMMS/EAM to help document how the maintenance shops
are spending monies, but most of us have found the current systems to be less than
adequate as a basis for sound decision-making, or to help justify what we “know” needs
to be done. Why is this? Most likely it is due to the databases that the systems are
designed on since they were designed by and/or for the accounting and banking
industries. They came with built- in accounting functions such as period costs,
depreciation, book value, payback, with some advance functions dealing with net present
value (NPV) and goal seek for built in functions to help find the lowest present cost.
Does this help us in Asset Management, Maintenance and Reliability Departments? Yes,
it does because it helps us to do our required financial reporting, request funds and build
business cases for investment. What it does not do is help us to do our mission-critical
functions. We not only have to report costs on a periodic basis, but also on the Life Cycle
Cost (LCC) of an Asset {or by some called Total Cost of Ownership (TOC) and by others
Whole Life Cost Analysis (WLCA)} the failure modes, frequency of those failures, time
to correct failures, make predictions on asset remaining life none of these are accounting
functions and were not initially built into the systems (though many have it now.)

If we believe that we must provide the agreed-upon level of service at the lowest realistic
cost, we first must know what it actually costs us to run our facilities. We do this by
prioritizing work, life cycle costing, reliability measurements, continuous improvement
and survival projections. But all the data for making these decisions and projections
comes from our experience and the CMMS/EAM that we have deployed. ,
So the data we collect in our systems must aid us in prioritizing work, determining life
cycle cost, measuring reliability, measuring effectiveness, predicting failures, providing
for improvement and help us determine remaining useful life of our assets.

I first learned maintenance in the US Navy. It was simple: we had everything pre-
planned right down to the smallest details. If you needed wiping rags on a PM, the
scheduling was done by cards, a chart and smart periodicity code with the goal of
preventing failures between refits. We needed all the equipment ready to do battle on a
moment’s notice, and we wanted it all used up equally by the time we came in for refit.
For that was our mission, not maximize ROI. We provided an agreed-upon level of
service (ready for battle on a moment’s notice) at an agreed-upon cost (Defense Budget)
like any other asset-intensive industry. But even then we were finding ways not to do
intensive maintenance on equipment such as vibration monitoring and oil analysis.

The times have changed a lot and it is for the better - but it is not easy.

So where to start? As Steven Covey says, “Put first things first.” What is it that you want
your program to be, how do you want to measure it, how do you know when things are
going right or wrong? I would suggest that you start with picking 3 to 6 SMRP metrics
that measure what you think you should be looking at to manage your assets through your
CMMS/EAM. Analyze the metrics: can your current system measure them in a
meaningful way? If not, what needs to change, and who is going to do it? If you are here
it is you!

One piece of information that most people want is productivity, usually measured by
time on work orders (doing work) verses time scheduled (not doing work). Unfortunately
this measure is prone to errors. Too many work orders get logged for the same problem,
thus labor gets put on each one because perhaps the feeling exists that if we do not report
a day’s work on work orders staff will be reduced. (A real feeling in the environment we
are in since GFC of 2008)

One of the other key measurements people want from their CMMS is reliability as
measured by the key performance indicators (KPI) of MTBF (mean time between
failure). MTBF is typically y calculated at the number of CM’s per unit of time. This too
is one that is hard to accurately capture due to the amount of corrective work orders that
are logged for something other than an asset failure. For example, your general manager
does a plant walk-through and tells you to put in a work order on #3 Machine because it
needs to be cleaned because it is dusty. Should you count this work order in your
measurement of MTBF or do you explain asset failure measurements to your general
manager at that time? The other issue is whether you have clearly defined what failure is
to your organization and if you have a way of tracking that in the system. Do you want
MTBF on all your assets, even the fan in the locker room? Or do you want to track it on
highly critical assets and focus on getting them under control?

Another piece of information important to most managers is life cycle cost, in other
words, what is the least costly way of getting something done. This has been made more
difficult to capture since OpEx and CapEx are generally accounted for in different
methods and the operational expense when design is being done has historically been
estimated. How often are those estimations accurate? We generally have been told that
energy costs across a pump’s life are almost half of that of the next largest cost which is
maintenance (including renewals over the life of the asset). Given these assumptions,
80% - 90% of the cost of a pump is OpEx, so in order to account for this in our CMMS
we need to cross over departmental boundaries and find the data in various systems.
Perhaps you can now see that the lack of clear data makes LCC a very arduous figure to
calculate. From the Hydraulic Institute /Europump’s Pump Life Cycle Costs: A Guide to
LCC Analysis for Pumping Systems we get the equation for Life Cycle Cost (LCC) as

LCC=Cic+Cin+Ce+Co+CM+CS+Cenv+Cd
Whereas I see it these most easily break down as follows:
Ci c= initial costs (Design and Acquisition Process Costs)
(design, engineering, RFQ/Bid process costs, contract administration
costs, testing, training, auxiliary equipment design, O&M’s)
Cin = installation & commissioning cost (Purchase and install costs)
(actual equipment purchase, permits, initial inventory of spares,
foundations, setting & grouting, connecting
pipes/electrical/instrumentation/auxiliary systems/other utilities,
performance evaluation at start up, proof testing)
 Ce = energy costs
This can be either actual from a meter or calculated from system variables
Co = operation cost
Supervisory costs i.e. rounds/checks/logs, chemicals other utilities like
water, sewage or compressed air
Cm = maintenance and repair cost
PM, PdM and CM costs along with rehab/refurbish costs
Cs = down time cost
The cost of lost production is dependent on downtime and differs from
case to case.
Cenv = environmental costs
Costs of contaminant disposal, environmental inspections/fees
Cd = decommissioning/disposal cost
This includes revenue from residual value and costs from restoration of
site, demolition of equipment

Most modern CMMS can hold all of the above information if you plan for this up front.
The Ci c= initial costs, and Cin = installation & commissioning cost, will come from the
project costs for a new system or asset and most of the time is a lump sum field in your
CMMS for the asset: sometimes the initial book value, sometimes it is actual project
costs, and sometime it is just an accounting number since the real costs of program
management is unknown. The reason you should include this in your CMMS is because
during the useful life of the asset you will have many opportunities to make
repair/replace/renew decisions and having what the project initially cost is of critical
importance to making that decision. You just need to know what and where that number
came from and is.

The Ce = energy costs is more problematic for most companies as this information is not
readily available to CMMS’s, rather, the most readily available information tends to be
run hours and motor name plate data. Considering that half of a pump’s lifetime cost is
energy we should make a more of a concentrated effort to get actual energy usage from
installed meters or from VFD’s. Having the actual energy usage of an asset allow for the
simple evaluation of its performance and can be trended over time with actual data.
KW/gal pumped, KW/unit of production and when the usage goes up trigger effective
correction activities long before noticeable process degradation. So by focusing on Ce and
getting it into our CMMS can help not only our LCC but can increase our ability to
effectively meet our objectives.

The Co = operation cost is easy to calculate if the people in your plant fill out work orders
for the rounds but in my experience this is most often neglected. Most maintenance
departments’ CMMS systems do not track what operators do on their daily rounds. This
is a gap that needs to be filled as it is causing a lot of duplication of effort in my
experience. If you have an operator doing daily checks on oil level in a gear box, why
would you send a limited maintenance resource to check it weekly? I know most of us do
this just to make sure it gets done and documented because if it fails we want a record in
the system that someone actually looked at it. We all need to work on getting all the
work/inspections done on an asset recorded on the asset in our system of record. This also
includes the utilities not included in energy such as water, wastewater, chemicals,
compressed air, and steam if not included as part of energy.

With the cost of operations goes the Cm = maintenance and repair cost, this should
include in-house labor, contract labor, parts, supplies, materials, shop costs, Service
Agreement Costs, special tools costs if not accounted for elsewhere, equipment costs
such as lifts, rentals or fork trucks etc. These costs are accounted for in the system
normally through work orders on the assets for discrete work or regular inspections.
These costs should include renewal and refurbishment costs in addition to regular repair
and PM/PdM costs. This requires a dedication from the department that every time we
touch the asset we have a record (WO) for what was done, why and by whom.

Cs = down time cost is another hard one to get and tends to be very industry specific. In
the wastewater industry it is next-to-impossible due to the amount of redundancy built
into the systems. That said, if you lose production due to a failure you need to account for
it with in your asset accounting, otherwise when making repair/replace decisions you do
not have the complete cost picture and can be led to making an unwise decision.

Cenv = environmental costs are the costs that frequently get overlooked as just part of
doing business. These costs should capture any outside organization that needs to come
in and do inspections, broken down to the asset level. In our plants our National
Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit is considered overhead for the
whole plant, whereas in your plant it may be a Cenv because it is just a small part of your
plant. In our plant a boiler operating permit would be a Cenv to the boiler but if you are a
power plant it may just be overhead. All that said you need to be consistent and codify
how you are accounting for it. Other costs such as disposal costs for used oil, used
coolant or other supplies should be included here but may just be included in the Cm as
costs for the supplies. All of this information needs to be captured so that is future
decisions on viable alternatives can be made from an informed standpoint.

Finally Cd = decommissioning/disposal costs need to be included, and any income

generated by the disposal. These costs includes returning the site to “as-found” or
“better” condition if the asset is no longer needed, or, preparing the site for the
replacement process/asset. This too can be challenging to capture as most of the time the
cost is included in the contract cost of the replacement. If we really want the LCC of
something we have to change the breakdown of our projects going forward.

Why do we want to include all of this information in our CMMS? Probably the most
important reason is that, most of us are responsible for setting up budgets and capturing
the data in one place makes the budgeting process less painful. Most of us also make
fix/buy new decisions daily based on incomplete information because of how
inaccessible and incomplete the data is. We also have to make recommendations on
operating/maintenance strategy - which is so much easier to do with real data.
We need to find the bad actors in our system, whether they are high energy usage, high
maintenance cost, high consumable costs or high product costs, we need to be have the
ability to compare apples to apples with a high degree of confidence. The better we get at
the data entry side , the better we all get on the analysis side; the better the usage of
failure coding into the system, the better the failure analysis or PM effectiveness review.

Where do we go from here is what most people ask after going through the above
discussion with me. I usually go back to Coveys First Things First, which recommends
sitting down and designing what you want to manage with and how you want to track it.
(Do not create your own metrics use the SMRP ones much easier to defend and they are
well thought through). From there, you need to figure out how the current CMMS/EAM
stacks up to what you want: is there a path forward in the current system to get to where
you want to be, or do you need a re-implementation of the system. Or maybe you need
a new system that has the capabilities that you desire.

Whatever your needs, make the business case and move forward. If you can do this in
house, great. If not find a partner that shares your vision create the long term plan
together and get started.

Quite clearly we all need to start by identifying what we want as outputs from the
system, then design policies and procedures to get that data in place, implement the
change (not easy), train everyone and – finally - review the outcomes. It sounds simple
enough but it is never easy.