Is your company truly benefiting from outsourcing maintenance and calibration?
One of the increasing trends that we have witnessed is the growing demand for outsourced preventative maintenance and calibration. Life Science companies across the country are more frequently and consistently utilizing calibration labs and contractors to perform work on their facility’s equipment in order to save them time and money. However, how does a company know that they are truly benefiting from outsourced maintenance and calibration work?
Management must prove that ROI exists from their outsourced maintenance contractors in order to justify the cost of hiring them. One way to prove that ROI is being generated from maintenance contracts is to utilize vendor tracking within an EAM, CMMS or CCMS or Blue Mountain Regulatory Asset Manager (RAM).
Steps to track outsourced maintenance in an EAM, CMMS or CCMS
Contractor tracking can be done by following these three steps in your enterprise asset management software:
- Assign an outsourced vendor to an asset and utilize PM work orders – (they should be generated when work is scheduled and completed).
- Log all maintenance events completed by outside vendors. This creates a detailed log of when the maintenance was due and when the contractor performed the work.
- Utilize scheduling to alert of upcoming work orders to be completed by the vendor – even if they are responsible for keeping track of them. This tracks missed preventive maintenance work orders, out of date calibrations and vendor reliability.
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Benefits of using EAM, CMMS or CCMS to track outsourced maintenance
By following the three steps above, a company can use the collected data to:
- Compare the performance of internal maintenance activities with maintenance completed by vendors. This includes the number of successful work order completions, on-time or overdue work orders, failed work orders, quality of work, etc.
- Perform Predictive Analysis to identify unnecessary, repeated work orders, spare parts costs and expected time delays.
- Review outsourced contracts by comparing vendors to one another with the data collected in the EAM, CMMS or CCMS. Often this comparison includes which vendor is more reliable (the vendor with the least number of missed work orders), the vendor that fulfills the maintenance tasks at the lowest cost, the one that provides the best quality of work, etc.
The 360 view of your contractors from an EAM perspective
Overall, the outcome of using an EAM, CMMS or CCMS or Blue Mountain RAM to manage maintenance vendors is vital. Companies who utilize these steps obtain a 360 degree view of their relationship with a particular contractor which reveals whether or not that vendor delivers ROI for the company. In addition, companies who track this information stand on stronger ground for contract negotiation based on factual, visible past vendor performance which allows for contract cancellations or cutting of vendor expenses. All of these decisions can be made with a detailed reference log from the EAM, CMMS or CCMS. The value in tracking vendors in either an enterprise asset management software or Blue Mountain RAM can lead to higher overall facility performance and cost efficiency.