At a time when UK businesses continue to face rising cost pressures – encompassing energy, labour, supply-chain issues, and compliance overhead – it is crucial not to overlook the benefits that computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) software can bring.
CMMS software is a tool used in building maintenance management for the tracking and management of all physical assets. It is effectively a “digital assistant” for this aspect of a business’s operations, helping to simplify the maintenance management process.
To put it another way: if you wish your business to better keep track of such things as when its machines need to be fixed, what spare parts will be required, and who has responsibility for certain tasks, the right CMMS platform can play a pivotal role. It will effectively turn maintenance into a strategic cost-control tool for your organisation.
Our very own Vision Pro Software is an excellent example of a CMMS-capable platform, offering tailored solutions to UK businesses that need to manage assets, audits, and compliance.
From firefighting to forecasting: the cost of reactive maintenance
It is inevitable within any organisation that equipment and assets will age, deteriorate, and fail over time. If, however, you depend on only ever responding to problems with your business’s assets once they appear – effectively “firefighting” issues – this can be significantly more expensive over time than if a predictive or preventive maintenance approach is followed.
After all, waiting for equipment to fail means your organisation likely suffering from downtime at unexpected and unwelcome times. A merely reactive maintenance approach can also lead to more extensive damage to the equipment than would be the case if components were replaced prior to them failing. More labour and parts will likely be required, too.
Such issues – and that’s before we even mention the safety risks – mean that reactive maintenance ultimately costs approximately three to five times’ more than preventive maintenance over time.
For the typical UK manufacturing or property business, a reactive maintenance approach could result in them spending thousands more annually due to unplanned asset failures. Preventive maintenance schedules can help such an organisation to significantly cut these costs.
If, then, you are looking to save money for your organisation over time, you will probably be interested in how CMMS can automate your business’s preventive maintenance scheduling – thereby making it less of a burden.
By automating inspection and maintenance reminders, Vision Pro Software could be instrumental in shifting your organisation’s approach to upkeep from reactive to proactive.
Reducing downtime and emergency repair costs
Depending on what sector your organisation is in, downtime could cost you around £4,000 to £40,000 per hour. The most suitable CMMS, however, can directly reduce these losses, by achieving a 30% to 50% reduction in equipment failure.
Vision Pro Software allows for real-time asset tracking and condition-based maintenance, using mobile/Near Field Communication (NFC) data input. All of this helps to prevent critical failures.
A building services team, for example, is likely to appreciate how the use of automated checks and alerts through Vision Pro Software enables them to avoid emergency callouts.
Smarter inventory management and just-in-time parts ordering
The leading CMMS platforms are highly effective at tracking spare part usage and automating the reordering process. These optimisations can help to cut inventory costs by as much as 15% to 25%. They can be key to avoiding stockouts and eliminating expensive emergency procurement at an organisation.
Sure enough, Vision Pro Software can support the realisation of these goals for your own business. Our software can integrate inventory tracking with audit trails to ensure the alignment of your organisation’s stock levels with its real maintenance needs.
Improving labour productivity and reducing overtime
Did you know that “non-wrench time” – in other words, time wasted on administrative tasks, instead of being spent directly focused on hands-on repair or maintenance work – typically accounts for about 20% to 30% of a technician’s time?
As an organisation, you will probably want to unlock much of that 20% to 30% of wasted technician time, in order to optimise your asset maintenance procedures.
Sure enough, Vision Pro Software gives technicians the ability to access digital asset histories, work orders, and manuals, even on mobile. This helps to improve team efficiency and reduce overtime by 25%.
A classic use case would be a field team turning to Vision Pro Software’s mobile app to instantly access job specifications. Doing this helps such personnel to minimise back-and-forth and improve first-time fix rates.
Extending asset lifespan and deferring capital costs
Any responsible organisation would welcome the opportunity to extend the lifespan of their assets by 25% to 30%, deferring the need for expensive replacements quite so soon.
Sure enough, this is precisely what the regular and thorough maintenance of such assets can help achieve, and that a CMMS platform can assist in making a reality for your organisation.
Vision Pro Software contributes to this goal by tracking the entire history of assets, thereby linking inspections, warranties, and maintenance events for lifecycle visibility.
Simplifying compliance, warranty tracking, and audit readiness
Regulatory compliance failures and missed warranties bring a cost for businesses running into the millions. So, you can probably imagine what a profound impact it could have on your organisation to have a CMMS platform that tracks warranties, ensures compliance with safety standards, and stores essential documents.
Yes, this is another aspect of your company’s operations that Vision Pro Software can greatly help with. Our cloud-based software specialises in compliance-based audits for risks including fire, legionella, and asbestos. Furthermore, it auto-notifies teams on safety-critical tasks.
Lowering energy bills through better maintenance
It can be easy for time-pressed organisations to overlook the fact that poorly maintained equipment consumes as much as 5% to 15% more energy than assets that are proactively and vigilantly looked after.
This is another reason why CMMS platforms can be so important; by helping to enforce equipment tuning and filter changes, they can be key to lowering utility bills.
Not only does Vision Pro Software enable sustainability tracking, but it also incorporates features to tie energy-saving actions to organisations’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals.
Data-driven decision-making and analytics
Something else that a leading CMMS package can do, is collect data to help identify trends in asset failure, staff productivity, and cost overrun.
With its visual dashboards and automated reporting, Vision Pro Software supports smarter planning and budgeting. This enables teams to optimise maintenance frequency and the allocation of resources.
CMMS scalability for SMEs vs large enterprises
If you are a key decision-maker for a small to medium-sized enterprise (SME), you might be especially hesitant to adopt CMMS, due to its perceived cost and complexity.
The reality, however, is that modern CMMS solutions like Vision Pro Software tend to be modular, cloud-based, and scalable – whether up or down – in accordance with the specific needs of both small sites and enterprise portfolios.
Vision Pro Software offers templates and app integration that help make it an excellent fit for both established high-volume operations and particularly lean teams.
Consider, for example, that you are a small contractor, and your business grows to the extent that you find yourself managing multiple locations. If you have already adopted Vision Pro Software, our platform will be able to scale with you. This means you won’t need to invest effort, time, and money into switching to a new CMMS.
How Vision Pro Software helps
Vision Pro Software is a cloud-based CMMS software package from the UK, that has been designed and built to serve compliance-heavy and asset-intensive environments.
This platform incorporates a variety of features that are relevant to cost reduction, such as:
- Automated preventive maintenance scheduling
- Integrated audits for the management of such risks as fire, legionella, and asbestos
- Mobile inspections with support for NFC and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies
- Real-time analytics and dashboard reporting
- Centralised documentation for compliance and warranty recovery
Such features, in turn, deliver considerable value for UK businesses. Vision Pro Software can help reduce reporting time by up to 74%, in addition to delivering a 68% improvement in risk assessment outcomes.
Tailored for industries like property, healthcare, facilities, manufacturing, and local Government, Vision Pro Software really can be the complete solution for a very broad range of organisations.
Conclusion and next steps
Ultimately, as we hope this article has helped make clear, CMMS isn’t merely a solution for making an organisation’s asset maintenance tasks easier – it is a financial strategy.
By adopting the right CMMS platform and using it in ways that bring improved maintenance, labour, compliance, and inventory control, you could achieve annual savings for your organisation amounting to as much as £100,000 to £1 million or more. As far as cumulative return on investment (ROI) is concerned, that would be seriously impressive.
With its UK-based features devised and constructed for regulatory environments, multi-site operations, and integrated audits, Vision Pro Software could make a fundamental contribution to the lowering of your organisation’s maintenance costs.
To learn more about Vision Pro Software and to arrange a demo, please feel free to contact us.
