eMaint CMMS

Vorteile: Customer support is the best that I have ever experienced. Their support team is well trained in maintenance reliability concepts, so they are quick to understand the unique requirements of your company. Better yet, they share this wealth of knowledge through their very helpful "Online eMaint University". They have various training programs & opportunities & very frequently hold local conferences that focus on both concepts & the software "how to's". The software itself is very powerful. The reports module gets my "most improved" award & is complete with graphs & instruments. If you can dream it, you can run a report on it. You have lots of freedom to customize the software in (most of) the right places so long as you can handle the learning curve or have an aptitude for database management but, out of the box, it should suffice for most companies as you can lean on eMaint support for help with customizing & much more. One of the strongest selling points for this software is that they joined forces with & are now owned by Fluke Corporation & are offering a line-up of Fluke tools that integrate with their software to bring condition monitoring, data analysis & reporting to a whole new level. Another favorite feature of mine is the eMaint Community, where you can post your ideas for new or improved software features or vote on other user's ideas. I get the sense that many of eMaint's feature updates are based on ideas on this forum & I'm glad they are listening to their users.

Nachteile: eMaint X4 has seemingly been the "beta" of the long awaited eMaint X5 due later this year (2017). The problem is that while X4 has been available & increasingly functional, its been over two years & there has been no official upgrade from X3 to X4 and some modules still exclusively use the old X3 platform that haven't received any upgrades. A specific example is the work order/pm scheduler. X4 is very aesthetically pleasing and functional but navigating from to the scheduler module is a transition comparable to drinking a cool glass of ice water & then choking down a spoonful of sand. As far as functionality of the scheduler, I have tried several times to learn how to use it & each time I walked away wondering why it was ever implemented in the first place. It's difficulty of setup & general usage far outweighs any usefulness it might have. While eMaint has done great with keeping up with updates to most of the modules, they would do well to step it back a bit & get caught up with some key modules that have been neglected for too long. Form design is another key function that could use some attention.

Kommentare: Cardinal CG, Buford Georgia is one of 28 Cardinal Glass facilities manufacturing residential glass products. Upon my joining the Buford plant, the company had not made a profit in five years. The company lacked organization and was not producing product in an efficient manner. Our facility is unique to the other Cardinal plants, because we have two separate manufacturing processes running as separate cost centers. Because of the structure of the company, each cost center has separate support staff (i.e. maintenance, engineering and management). In October 2008, I joined the Cardinal CG Buford location. As Tempering Maintenance Manager, I was challenged with turning the Tempering production side of the operation around. There was no CMMS system in place and no one was tracking the machine downtime. Safety was out of control; there were three accidents in my department in the first two weeks of my accepting the position. Vibration analysis reports were not being reviewed and costly failures were frequent. The department had a shift log book, but the data was not in a format that could easily be put into a database. The Coating Maintenance department was using MP2 for their data collection. In an effort to get a CMMS up and running quickly, I acquired an additional license and began to enter data. After a week or two, I attempted retrieve some of the data in MP2, but the reporting feature had not been installed. I then contacted the CMMS vendor (Mp2) to inquire about reporting my data in the format needed.

After several conversations relating to the reporting within the CMMS, I was told that they could not provide the report that my boss had requested. I offered to purchase the reporting module, but no one attempted to follow up with my request. This is how the search for a new system began. Because my background and interest was in CMMS programs, I began my search on the Internet. I had followed various CMMS over the years, and realized that an investment in a CMMS program could be very costly. As I searched, indicators were leading me toward a cloud-based system.

The criteria for the CMMS was (1) support had to be readily available on all shifts and (2)the cost of implementation had to be low. One of my concerns was transferring the data from MP2 to the new database. Time to implement was critical also. I had to drive the downtime down. My selection came down to E-Maint X3 . The product demo offered online provided all of the initial answers to the questions that would come forth during a selection process for a CMMS. Because it is a subscription-based system, the cost to implement is very low. The implementation of EMaint was simple and very fast. I had total control of the implementation process. The transfer of the data files went without a hitch. I cannot begin to express how well the transition went. One of the greatest strengths of E-Maint is the administrator can change any of the field names or report formats. Unlike other programs where there is a fee each time you make a change to the program, E-Maint allows you to format your database to suit your industry. E-Maint is not just another canned product that you take as-is. Of course when you mention a web based program, management initially will push back because they do not want employees to access the Web. I suggested to E-Maint that they setup an email address for work requests to dump into and then pull the data to a work request form. This has proven to be the answer to get around issues with accessing the Internet. E-Maint provides all of the security levels needed to prevent just anyone from accessing your data. Because of the ability to send request via email, all requests dump to my iPhone and I have put an iPhone on the department golf cart for quick response. Because E-Maint is web-based, I could bring my crew into a conference room and review the program on a weekly basis. The training as a group lasted about 2 hours. The program is user-friendly and the subscription to E-Maint University has proven to assist the technicians in the use of the program. Customer support for the product is second to none. In most cases all of my issues are resolved during the phone conversations. The only real problems that I have experienced with E-Maint are those that I caused myself because of the freedom to change the program. It only takes one phone call to straighten the issue out. Customer Support will provide you a direct line to a technician so that you can work with the same person and build the relationship necessary to help build confidence in the use of the CMMS. Since implementation of E-Maint, we have continued to reduce machine downtime. Once the original CMMS database was functional we established a goal of 5% downtime or 95% UPTIME. Since the implementation of E-Maint we have established a goal of 98% UPTIME and have consistently hit 97.7% and at the time of the most current report we are at 99.34%.