3 Tips For Using A CMMS In The Food & Beverage Industry

Many industries have stringent requirements for asset and equipment maintenance, but it’s possible that none are as strict as the requirements in the food and beverage industry (save, perhaps, those of the pharmaceutical industry). When you’re manufacturing consumables, it’s understandable that clean, well-maintained machinery is an absolute must.

Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) are a method by which you can make your asset maintenance more efficient. Describing all of the functions of a CMMS is outside the scope of what we want to explore here, but in short, they’re a type of restaurant maintenance software that allows you to automate work orders and workflow, track equipment and equipment maintenance (as well as spare parts), and give you insights into when a piece of equipment may need to be maintained, repaired, or replaced.

We’re going to look at three tips to improve your business’s efficiency through the use of a CMMS. One of its core functionalities is to help you with all forms of restaurant maintenance software.

Use Work Orders to Your Advantage

One of the core functionalities of a CMMS is work order management. In brief, you can use work order management to instantly send work to a given technician, and to see what work is scheduled for a particular piece of equipment.

This can be a massive boon, especially if you’re also using your CMMS to schedule preventive maintenance. Imagine this scenario – you’ve got a brew system with preventive maintenance scheduled, and three days later, a pump is scheduled to be replaced on the same system. Instead of wasting work doing preventive maintenance on the pump, you can reschedule the restaurant maintenance software for the same day that the pump is being replaced. 

By actively viewing all of the work scheduled on a piece of equipment, you’ll be able to find a lot of efficiencies you may have been missing before.

Automating Maintenance

As alluded to earlier, you can use CMMS to automate preventive maintenance on your equipment. One of the biggest advantages of CMMS is the use of customizable triggers. These triggers allow you to customize preventive maintenance beyond your typical “once per time period” schedule.

For example, instead of maintaining a piece of equipment on a monthly basis, you can instead opt to maintain it after X amount of use, tracking usage in your CMMS. This is great for pieces of equipment that you use a lot sometimes, but less other times. Triggers are also customizable; you might, for example, connect your CMMS restaurant maintenance software with a spreadsheet that tracks temperature fluctuations in a cooling unit, and triggers preventive maintenance when those temperatures fall out of a normal range for X amount of days in a row.

Automating maintenance can help you ensure you’re always meeting regulatory compliance goals and can help your equipment last longer.

Go Paperless

You should transfer all of your inventory, be it equipment or spare parts, onto your CMMS. A CMMS is accessible from anywhere, and you can create specific locations into which you input all of your equipment. This makes it much easier to track where equipment is, which is especially useful if you have multiple warehouses/production facilities. 

Another advantage is accessibility – you’ll be able to edit the contents of your CMMS on the fly, no matter where you are, and you can give access to other people on your team. That means that even if technicians are away from the site, or you need to edit things while you’re in another country, you can do so easily.

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