How maintenance impacts the bottom line

The role of maintenance and operations managers has many moving parts and shifting priorities.

Today, M&O managers are vital contributors to the organizational bottom line.

Why?

With increasing pressure on executives to produce ROI, businesses now lean on managers to provide data demonstrating value.

The C-level wants to see growth and potential, which calls for systems that can produce actionable data to optimize equipment to streamline energy usage, improve physical asset management, save money on maintenance and repairs and reduce waste. 

(Keyword: actionable).

According to Marc Evans, Brightly’s Vice President of Government Solutions, executives have the same goals across the board: it doesn’t matter how M&O managers get the data. They just need to deliver outcomes. 

There’s been a shift from IT implementing a product because it sounds like the right thing to do to somebody at the executive level saying, ‘Actually, I don't care if you use a piece of software or you put it into an Excel spreadsheet. I need this outcome.’

Marc Evans

Vice President of Government Solutions, Brightly

Evans continues, “From the C-level’s perspective, the outcome is that managers are going to have less budget. But they need managers to provide more equipment and staff performance, productivity, prove departmental value, and ensure that assets are available.” 

Pressure on the bottom line shifts the focus of executives toward outcomes 

What can managers do to showcase their contributions to facility executives? For example, they can clearly demonstrate the ROI and long-term savings of a chiller replacement.

M&O managers can further support their efforts by answering questions like: 

• How are your activities impacting the organization’s bottom line? 
• Have you reduced your budgets or generated savings?  
• Are you able to ensure asset functionality?  
• What are the performance levels of assets in your domain?  

Priorities have shifted. Instead of wanting to know when an asset fails, the C-level prefers regular reports on performance. Whether it costs money or not, they need to know the assets are generating the proper output for their clients or their organization.

When executives spend money to react to asset issues, they’re not being proactive. Tighter budgets force M&O managers to use data to identify preventive maintenance opportunities.  

In Evans' view, M&O managers can’t fix assets by letting them fail; they need to identify ways to avoid paying for reactive maintenance costs.  

“If an M&O manager has thousands of assets failing all the time, executives are just pumping money into response,” Evans argues. “If the executive team has a tighter budget, that may change how they do business with their clients. Maybe you can no longer physically afford to put a 2-hour response time into a contract with a maintenance provider. So, you need to implement systems to become proactive.” 

Give your managers the solution they need to help protect the bottom line 

Today, the C-level views managers as valuable to impacting profitability as any other part of an organization.

Whether it’s boosting uptime from 90% to 95% to meet demands for production increases or eliminating inefficiencies that can reduce total M&O costs, managers can help profitability as much as anyone. But to accomplish these profits, cost savings and efficiency improvements, asset managers need the right technology to pull these reports.

How does this happen?

With a capital investment into a CMMS.

No matter where you are on your data journey, there’s so much you can do with a good CMMS (computerized maintenance management system). The right CMMS can help M&O managers start automating comprehensive data-driven reports to go to supervisors and executives with data points on equipment reports, work completion rates, team productivity and KPIs aligned with your organizational goals.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. With heightened pressure to show effective M&O performance, managers need to be honest about their preventive maintenance approach.

To learn more about how our CMMS can help make impactful data-driven decisions, visit our Data Intelligence information.