Productivity: what the team gains with a CMMS

When people talk about productivity in maintenance, they usually think of people working faster. That’s almost never where the problem is. Time gets lost between jobs: in poorly chained travel, in visits that have to be repeated, in searching for information that exists but isn’t at hand, and in writing up neatly what had already been written once.

This article goes through those four drains and what reduces them, without promising percentages nobody has actually measured.

1. Travel

It’s the biggest cost item in almost any maintenance operation with field technicians, and the one that shows up least in analyses.

Two things reduce it. The first is letting the technician order their orders by route using GPS from the app, instead of handling them in the order they were assigned: crossing the city twice in a day is a cost that shows up in no report.

The second is self-assignment. The technician can see unassigned work orders and take them, because nobody knows better than they do whether it’s on their way and whether they’re carrying the material. That also removes the bottleneck of having one person handing out work all day.

2. Repeat visits

Going back to a site because a part was missing, because nobody knew which model the equipment was, or because nobody had the key to the room, is time paid for twice: the trip and the technician’s hour.

Material. A check that can’t be done because a spare part is missing is a check not done. Items carry their minimum stock, which warns before running out, and each technician’s van can be registered as its own warehouse, which is where the material actually is.

Equipment information. In the app, the technician has the asset’s history, documentation and any anomalies left open last time right in front of them, without calling the office. And since those documents are stored on the device, they’re still available in a basement with no coverage.

What was left pending. An order can be marked as pending material and as needing a return visit. Without those statuses, that work lives in a notebook and gets forgotten with notable frequency: the customer remembers before we do.

3. Searching for information

It’s the hardest drain to see because it’s lost in five-minute chunks. A technician calling to ask for a pump’s model. Someone searching three folders for a site’s floor plan. Last year’s report that a customer is disputing.

What solves it isn’t more folders: it’s the document hanging off the thing it belongs to. In the document manager, documents are attached to the asset, the customer, the site, the order, the incident, the machine model or the family, among other entities. When someone opens that piece of equipment, the manual is right there.

Each document also carries its own visibility — who can see it: customer, technician, supplier — which turns a repeated decision into a one-time setting.

4. Administrative work

Here there are three tasks that disappear entirely, not just get faster.

Writing up the report afterward. If the technician logs everything on site — a stopwatch inside the order, material consumed against the warehouse, checklist, photos and the customer’s signature on screen — there’s nothing left to type up later. Time logged is measured, not remembered, which also makes what gets invoiced match what it actually cost.

Tracking where each thing stands. The statuses of an incident can carry their own associated email, so a status change only notifies the person concerned. And with their own dedicated access, the customer checks the status of their orders, downloads their reports and sees their upcoming preventive visits without calling. A good share of the calls a maintenance company receives aren’t asking for anything: they’re asking how things are going.

Typing the same thing twice to invoice. Closed orders with their hours and material are what the ERP needs. The integrations catalog shows the scope of each connector, which isn’t the same for all of them and is worth checking beforehand.

5. Preventive maintenance, which is productivity deferred

Everything above is minutes. This is hours, and it shows up later.

A breakdown costs considerably more than the check that would have prevented it: the emergency trip, the downtime, the part with no delivery date, and work done in a rush. Preventive maintenance generated automatically from a frequency — with its technician, its date, and checking beforehand whether it’s a holiday or whether that person is available — is what turns a plan into something that actually happens.

And its effect can be tracked: the ratio of preventive to corrective hours is the indicator that best describes whether an operation is proactive or reactive.

6. What you gain by planning with workload in view

There’s a productivity loss that belongs to no one in particular and shows up in almost every department: half the team overloaded and the other half waiting. Nobody notices until someone complains or a job runs late.

With a list of orders sorted by date, that’s invisible, because the list has no person axis. In the calendar and in the diagram-based planning view it is: you see who has a full week, who has gaps, and — most useful — what work still has no owner, which is exactly what’s about to fall through.

And when something has to be moved, which happens every day, it gets dragged to another day. The criterion matters more than it seems: if updating the plan costs more than ignoring it, it gets ignored, and then the system stops reflecting reality.

How to know it’s improving

Without invented figures: the ones that come from your own data. The reports on hours per technician and per customer, time logs, downtime, deviation between estimated and actual time, and cost per piece of equipment are the ones that show whether anything has changed.

The most useful one at the start tends to be deviation between estimated and actual, because it almost always reveals that some type of job is being quoted below what it actually costs, and has been that way for years because nobody had the data.

A warning about using this data

It’s for sizing teams, quoting better and distributing workload. Not for watching anyone. A team that senses the system exists to control them stops feeding it accurately, and once that happens the reports become worthless and the productivity you wanted to measure becomes unmeasurable.

If you want to see this applied to your own operation, you can request a demo.