Emergency maintenance is required when your valuable assets experience unforeseen malfunction. This can cause considerable health and security issues or delays in large production processes. These kinds of issues need to be addressed as soon as they are detected and hence the term ‘emergency’ is used. Multiple team members need to coordinate to fix these major breakdowns which make the process quite challenging. There might be situations when all the other tasks of maintenance needs to suspend until the emergency gets resolves. In the industrial sectors, emergency maintenance requires to strike out the potential disasters which might happen due to failed control methods or failed assets in the company. There are different proactive maintenance strategies to deal with such emergency cases and all of this works the best when combined with CMMS. 

How to combine proactive maintenance strategies with CMMS to minimise emergency maintenance request numbers?

You can never totally eliminate the causes that give rise to emergency situations. However, you can definitely reduce the frequency and also mitigate the associated risk factors. You need to have a strong proactive maintenance strategy to reduce the number of sudden maintenance requests. These proactive strategies foremost address the emerging problems before they take shape into major ones. 4 such proactive strategies for emergency maintenance are as follows:

• Preventive maintenance strategy
• Predictive maintenance strategy
• Condition-based maintenance strategy
• Total Productive Maintenance strategy

To have complete control over your maintenance operations you need to combine the above-mentioned proactive strategies with CMMS. This combined emergency maintenance approach would also help to give a speedy response when an emergency situation starts arising. 

How does CMMS help to deal with emergency maintenance workflow?

You can report, record and process emergency maintenance situations by either of the following two ways or combining both:

• Manual mode of response– Stakeholders report the problem and a maintenance manager or supervisor performs the reviewing process of the work request. This ultimately leads to the generation of a work order to track the total repair and process of restoration.
• Automated response– In this type, the system automatically detects the problems in high-risk installations. No human intervention needs in this process. This type of automated responses includes striking out the immediate source of the problem and generation of electronic maintenance requests. Assets are equipped with IoT sensors which trigger in certain situations. Trigger Rules are based on a threshold value. As soon as it crosses the limiting value, the sensor sends an alert to the CMMS application. Technicians put up the rules in the rules engine based on a set of criteria to automate the maintenance process. It generates work orders when threshold values surpassed. 

How can you speed up an emergency maintenance response with the help of mobile CMMS?

Not only natural disasters, emergency cases can also arise in buildings due to human error, procedural loopholes and unexpected machine failures. You can help this kind of emergency situation by automating the process of maintenance using CMMS. This will reduce the consequences of fallout and would provide speedy emergency responses. The following 8 features of CMMS allow it to speed-up emergency maintenance responses:

• Enables real-time communication 
• Coordinates different staffs of your maintenance team
• Gives instant access to the maintenance checklists, speeding-up the process of repair.
• Gives instant access to LOTO (Lock out and Tag Out) procedures, safety instructions in a step-by-step manner and other such necessary documents.
• Quickly schedules the work order
• Sends notification to the right staff of the maintenance team
• Gives immediate access to asset maintenance history and by doing so speeds by the process of diagnosis. 
• Tracks resources which are being spent by a company on its emergency repairs.

The Bottom Line

No matter which type of response an organization uses, they have to use a CMMS solution that would save the records of the incidents. Ultimately, CMMS would build a digital trail with regard to emergency maintenance over time. It continuously provides important information for improvisation of the entire process. Whether reported manually or automatically, CMMS ultimately simplifies and facilitates the system of processing the emergency maintenance requests.

To win the battle against emergency maintenance issues, go for effective CMMS solutions provided by DreamzCMMS and attain maximum success.