Introduction to CMMS and EAM
Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) systems are software platforms that provide maintenance and asset management for asset-intensive industries such as oil and gas, chemical, and wastewater treatment. A CMMS focuses on maintenance while an EAM system handles a multitude of business functions.
What Is a Computerized Maintenance Management System?
Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) are software platforms used by many industries to manage maintenance data associated with a facility’s equipment. These platforms house data such as equipment records (including asset hierarchy and attributes), proactive maintenance schedules, corrective maintenance work orders, and spare parts inventory. CMMS are good for what they are designed to do: manage maintenance. They hold work orders, equipment records, and in some cases, Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO) data.
What Is Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)?
Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) systems are used by a variety of asset-intensive industries to manage the life cycle of an organization’s physical assets. EAM systems perform the same tasks as a CMMS, including scheduling maintenance, assigning resources, managing inventory, and tracking costs. EAM systems have additional functionalities that differ from CMMS, such as procurement, project management, equipment reliability tracking, accounting, and regulatory compliance.
How Does Your CMMS/EAM System Fit Into Data-Driven Reliability?
Without context and structure, data is essentially useless. Data-driven reliability is the framework for reliability improvement that connects the right data to your business decisions. This framework leverages data organization which helps you build relationships between all of your data sources. With data-driven reliability, you can connect your CMMS/EAM system with other data systems to ensure you have all the information you need to make more strategic decisions.
What is the Value of a CMMS and EAM?
CMMS and EAM systems consolidate key asset information in a centralized location, enabling operators to make more proactive maintenance decisions. Prior to the creation of these systems, many facilities relied on hard copies of information and multiple systems to document and track work requests and inventory. With CMMS and EAM systems, facilities can better manage maintenance tasks, streamline workflows, and automate preventive maintenance schedules. These systems help facilities shift to a more proactive approach to maintenance and ultimately reduce unnecessary costs and increase productivity.
Global Petrochemical Company Improves Safety and Compliance While Reducing Unplanned Downtime with Reliability Centered Maintenance Program
Learn how Pinnacle helped a global petrochemical leader improve safety, compliance, and operating costs through a non-fixed asset program. Pinnacle helped the organization better manage its operating risks through a Reliability Centered Maintenance program which included updating the organization’s equipment list in its CMMS, spare parts optimization, FMEA, and the identification of reliability opportunities and vulnerabilities.
What Does the Future of Reliability Look Like?
However, the limited focus of CMMS leaves gaps that require organizations to use other software tools to effectively manage a facility’s assets. Reliability data not typically managed within a CMMS include operator rounds, predictive maintenance results (e.g., vibration analysis, oil analysis, thermography), inspection results (e.g., internal and external inspections, thickness readings) collected as part of a Mechanical Integrity program, project management functionality, human resource management functionality, root cause analysis results, process historian readings, and laboratory sample results.
EAM systems also have limitations. While they manage maintenance activities, they don’t quantify how the activities contribute to reliability. Because of this limitation, they do not allow users to optimize activities that maximize reliability alone.
Owners of complex manufacturing systems are constantly trying to make better and faster decisions to improve reliability and maintenance. However, to make those decisions, they must work through millions of pieces of data that are stored separately—for example, in CMMS, Inspection Data Management System (IDMS), and Asset Performance Management (APM) programs. Today’s problem is not whether you have data but how you connect and use your data. Fortunately, the industry is continuing to see major advancements in data collection, organization, modeling, and analytics. With these capabilities in mind, we have the opportunity to take the next leap in reliability analysis, allowing us to improve reliability further while decreasing total lifecycle maintenance and inspection spend.
We believe this leap is made possible through Quantitative Reliability Optimization (QRO). QRO is an approach that connects every data point and analyzes the data to generate the most advanced, accurate, and current risk model to date. It enables system-based strategies—meaning you can prioritize actions across your entire facility based on current market conditions, availability goals, and/or budgetary constraints.
QRO can be used to harness more value from your CMMS or EAM software by connecting CMMS/EAM data to other useful data and systems, providing you with increased business intelligence. CMMS and EAM systems alone can still help you maximize production and reduce costs. However, QRO delivers a more holistic view of your assets’ health and further optimizes your maintenance activities by connecting all your asset data and allowing you to visualize key performance indicators (KPI) such as availability, risk, and cost. QRO can also simulate multiple asset management plans to develop the best path forward across units, facilities, and enterprises.
By better connecting asset data within one system, this next step in maintenance management provides for ongoing continuous improvement using the actual data from your facility, which will help you increase availability and decrease life cycle costs.
Learn how Quantitative Reliability Optimization (QRO) can help you leverage more value from your CMMS/EAM system.