The Importance of a CMMS as a Knowledge Management Tool

New hires are now responsible for capturing, understanding, and implementing data without the benefit of experience.

As such, efforts to successfully integrate this un-captured expertise in CMMS are vital to prevent that stored knowledge from walking out of the building. Documenting work tasks in the appropriate manner will help prevent errors from occurring.

A CMMS has the capability to provide maintenance management and staff with an automated tool capable of scheduling inspections, preventive maintenance, managing inventory, work orders, and retrieval of recorded asset history. This tool helps employees get up to speed with accurate company processes when the tasks lists are fully integrated. Maintenance solutions should extend to mobile devices to increase adoption and task compliance. Technicians can perform actual work with instructions on handhelds, enter how long it takes to complete work orders, filter through past work orders, and close out of the system. All the information is recorded in real-time, so managers can access the information instantaneously.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “18 minutes is the average search time for a document.” So mobility allows technicians to retrieve information instantaneously and spend more time fixing the asset instead of searching for the correct asset information.

Knowledge management within a CMMS will allow an organization to accelerate the rate at which new engineers learn asset and company information. Implementing a CMMS offers several other benefits, including:

• Reducing the dependency on tacit knowledge.

• Minimizing the loss of intellectual capital.

• Improving management quality and efficiency.

• Reducing risks/mistakes and minimizing liability.

• Increasing communication between staff and managers.

• Corporate standards increase the portability of employees between sites.

These are just some of the results of a properly implemented plan that could increase overall cost savings, increase staff participation and productivity levels within an infrastructure.

In Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande shows how eight hospitals implemented a bedside aide to navigate through complex procedures and the results showed the average number of complications and deaths dipped by 35 percent. Part of the list asked staff to introduce themselves before a procedure began, and in turn nurses were more comfortable speaking up when they saw a problem which in-creased patient care, communication, and decreased mortality. The medical industry implemented a checklist to create solutions to existing problems, so it’s time for maintenance professionals to take their check¬lists to a whole new level. Besides, Atul Gawande highlights, “One essential characteristic of modern life is that we all depend on systems— on assemblages of people or technologies or both—and among our most profound difficulties is making them work.”