Author: Ethan Wilke

Key Takeaways

• The high demand for plastic products requires organizations to invest in modern maintenance strategies and technologies.
• The plastics industry at large faces numerous maintenance management challenges that threaten production timelines and quotes, product quality, and overall profitability.
• CMMS software, like FTMaintenance Select, helps plastics manufacturers effectively manage assets, maintenance planning and scheduling, and more.

Plastic products play a critical role in our daily lives, ranging from simple household items like toothbrushes and combs, to cutting-edge technology like 3D printing. With an estimated global market value of $712 billion (USD), the high demand for plastic products highlights their importance across various consumer and industrial markets.

To keep pace with current demand and expected growth, plastics manufacturers must invest in effective maintenance strategies and technologies such as computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software. In this article, we will explore maintenance management challenges in the plastics industry and how a CMMS helps ensure efficient maintenance operations.

Common Maintenance Management Challenges in Plastic Manufacturing

Maintenance management is a critical component of plastics manufacturing, ensuring that equipment remains productive and profitable. However, there are several maintenance challenges that characterize the plastics industry. The sections below discuss some of the most common.

Mold Maintenance

Maintaining injection molds is challenging due to their strict durability requirements and the precision of care needed to manage them effectively. These molds can be incredibly costly, often $80,000 or more, in addition to the cost of the injection molding machines themselves. Organizations must minimize mold wear and tear through targeted maintenance while working within the constraints of the production schedule and tool and die team.

Coordination with the Tool and Die Team

Coordination with the tool and die team adds another layer of complexity to maintenance in plastics manufacturing. The tool and die team is responsible for designing, building, and repairing the molds, and has specialized knowledge and skills critical for maintaining production quality. The overlap in responsibilities between the general maintenance team and tool and die team often leads to challenges in balancing competing priorities and coordinating access to maintenance resources.

Further, miscommunication between maintenance and the tool and die teams may influence the production team’s operations. If maintenance tasks are scheduled during critical production runs or repairs aren’t completed on time, there may be unnecessary downtime, higher maintenance costs, or quality issues.

Quality Control

Given the high volume of products produced in plastics manufacturing, even minor equipment issues can lead to significant quality control issues. The maintenance team plays a critical role in ensuring plastic products meet stringent requirements and customer expectations.

Equipment must be kept in good working condition to eliminate defects such as surface imperfections, warping, cracking, or other inaccuracies. This requires the maintenance team to implement process control measures that include regular calibrations, condition monitoring, and preventive maintenance, which is challenging with limited resources.

Maintaining consistent quality control also becomes difficult when investigating the origin of product defects. Conducting thorough root cause analysis (RCA) is essential, but can be complex, time-consuming, and must be balanced against other immediate needs.

Environmental Factors

Environmental conditions within the plastics manufacturing facility also pose significant maintenance challenges. The high temperatures and pressures from plastic molding and extrusion processes put considerable wear on equipment, increasing the risk of failure. Avoiding these outcomes requires tight control of asset lifecycles and maintenance practices to ensure optimal performance.

Depending on your geographic location, humidity may also play a role in equipment maintenance. Excessive moisture can be absorbed by plastic materials and result in defects. Moisture that sits on equipment surfaces can corrode molds and metal components, compromising their integrity. Maintenance teams must take measures to control the temperature and humidity levels in manufacturing spaces.

Additionally, equipment is vulnerable to damage from fine plastic particles created during production. These particulates can enter machinery, causing abrasions and damaging sensitive components. While machine operators typically handle routine cleanings, maintenance teams are responsible for disassembly and deep cleaning during scheduled downtime periods.

Communication Between Maintenance and Production

Just as in other manufacturing environments, the degree of communication between maintenance and production teams can present considerable challenges. Production teams expect equipment to run at peak performance and support smooth, continuous operation in order to meet production goals and deadlines. The maintenance team is often blamed if equipment fails or experiences unplanned downtime.

On the other hand, maintenance teams can struggle to gain access to equipment for repairs. Tight production schedules leave small windows open for maintenance, and any downtime can be seen as jeopardizing production quotas. This lack of access makes it difficult to perform necessary preventive maintenance, leading to the risk of more sever breakdowns and extended downtime.

How a CMMS Helps Plastics Manufacturers Overcome Common Maintenance Challenges

Overcoming the maintenance challenges of plastics manufacturing requires a robust maintenance strategy. Computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software provides the tools needed to meet these challenges head-on and better manage your maintenance operations. Below are some ways that a CMMS benefits the plastics industry.

Comprehensive Asset Tracking

A CMMS provides robust asset management features essential for tracking molds and plastic manufacturing equipment. It allows you to keep detailed records on all maintenance assets, including their specification, condition, availability, usage, and maintenance history. Using this information, you can manage asset lifecycles more effectively and ensure each piece of equipment receives the attention it needs.

Improved Maintenance Planning and Scheduling

In industries with high production volumes like plastics manufacturing, time is money. The consequences of downtime make reactive maintenance strategies unsustainable. The maintenance planning and scheduling features of a CMMS empower you to be more proactive about maintenance management.

CMMS software allows you to create a master preventive maintenance plan for all of your production assets, ensuring that routine maintenance is performed on time. Tasks lists allow you to define exactly what needs to be done, what materials and supplies should be used, and approximately how long routine tasks should take, leading to more consistent, quality maintenance. Work orders can then be triggered using time-based or runtime-based intervals, ensuring maintenance occurs when needed.

Some CMMS systems take proactive maintenance a step further and connect with condition-monitoring sensors. This integration supports advanced maintenance strategies like condition-based maintenance (CbM), which triggers work orders based on real-time equipment conditions, and predictive maintenance (PdM) which forecasts when equipment is expected to fail. These strategies allow you to perform maintenance only when it is needed, unlike with time-based maintenance practices.

Better Communication and Collaboration

Successful maintenance management in the plastics industry relies on effective communication and collaboration between the maintenance, tool and die, and productions teams. A CMMS ensures that the general maintenance team and tool and die team have access to the same maintenance information about production equipment and can work together to prioritize repairs and coordinate resources.

CMMS solutions also include a work request portal that allows non-maintenance employees to submit service requests directly to the maintenance team. With this feature, the production team can submit requests, check request status, and be automatically notified when requests change status or are completed. This level of transparency makes everyone aware of when maintenance will occur and creates a more collaborative relationship between maintenance and production.

Enhanced Failure Analysis

Using a maintenance tracking system enables you to leverage historical maintenance data in order to diagnose why equipment failed. CMMS solutions automatically create a service history for each asset, providing you with a wealth of data that can be used to identify failure trends, track reliability following repairs, and generate maintenance management reports that reveal key insights about asset performance. This allows you to move beyond treating symptoms and address the root causes of breakdowns, thereby preventing the likelihood of the problem recurring.

Read Also: What is a Failure Code?, What is a Cause Code?, and What is a Remedy Code?

Stay In Production with FTMaintenance Select

The plastics manufacturing industry faces many maintenance management challenges that significantly impact production, product quality, and overall profitability. Given the importance of plastics in our lives, organizations that fail to tackle these challenges may find it difficult to maintain consistent production.

Now is the time to modernize your maintenance operations and invest in a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) like FTMaintenance Select. FTMaintenance Select provides robust tools for managing assets, inventory, preventive maintenance, and work requests. Leveraging this platform, you can implement proactive maintenance strategies that will reduce downtime, ensure consistent production, and set you up for long-term success. Request a demo today to learn more.

Read More about FTMainenance Select benefits for the plastics industry

Key Takeaways

• Hospitals and healthcare facilities face numerous maintenance challenges not experienced in other industries
• Healthcare facility maintenance is crucial for ensuring safety, security, and functionality, particularly as it applies to the patient experience
• Hospitals can leverage a CMMS to optimize healthcare facility maintenance and operations

Healthcare facilities are a complex ecosystem of interconnected systems and spaces designed for patient care, administrative and support functions, and facility operations. These characteristics set hospitals and similar facilities apart from other types of buildings, posing unique maintenance challenges for healthcare facility managers. To overcome these obstacles, facility managers rely on computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software to gain better control over maintenance operations.

What is Healthcare Facilities Management (HFM)?

According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), hospital facility management is “an interdisciplinary business function that coordinates space, infrastructure, people, and organization in the hospital. It is responsible for the management and coordination of work projects for the construction, renovation and ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure at the hospital.”

As we covered in our article, What is Facility Management?, facility management involves hard and soft services. To recap, hard facility management services relate to the physical building, and include functions such as preventive maintenance, capital improvements, and management of building systems. Soft services focus on the people who use the building, encompassing responsibilities such as security, emergency preparedness, and janitorial services.

Role of Maintenance in Healthcare Settings

Numerous stakeholders are affected by the healthcare facility’s condition and performance, causing maintenance activities to be heavily scrutinized.

People go to healthcare facilities to check, keep up, and restore their health. They expect buildings to be safe, secure, and functional. Maintenance teams work tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure medical buildings run at their best, so as to not introduce any risk that may compromise the quality of healthcare services. But it’s not just patients who feel the effects – the condition of healthcare facilities affects everyone who enters the building including doctors, nurses, support staff, and visitors.

Apart from the people who work in and use hospitals, those who own and manage healthcare facilities also have a vested interest in maintenance as well. First off, maintaining a hospital is costly. It is estimated that operations and maintenance accounts for 80-85% of a healthcare facility’s capital project dollars, with maintenance occupying most of a facility manager’s responsibilities. Aside from costs, ownership must carefully monitor how the effectiveness of healthcare facility maintenance affects patient satisfaction, reputation, insurance reimbursement, and legal liability.

Challenges of Hospital Facility Maintenance

Every industry faces its own set of unique challenges, and hospitals and healthcare facilities are no different. Below are some examples of what makes healthcare facility maintenance so complex.

Round-the-clock Maintenance Operations

Hospitals bustle with activity both day and night. Maintenance teams are responsible for keeping critical building systems in operation at all times. This presents a major challenge for hospital maintenance – finding time to perform scheduled maintenance without causing downtime.

Round-the-clock operations require skillful planning and scheduling. First, if primary equipment must be taken offline for maintenance, a backup or alternative must be arranged. With limited backups available, assets must be maintained on a staggered schedule, creating a constant flow of maintenance work.

Further, maintenance must take any chance they can get to perform routine maintenance tasks. Maintenance schedules should be flexible enough to accommodate changing priorities, off-hours, or emergencies.

Adding to the administrative demands of planning and scheduling is the communication of maintenance tasks and coordination of resources. 24/7 operations means that responsibilities are handed off between shifts, and maintenance activities must be effectively communicated to new staff arriving to work.

Equipment Reliability

Managing the maintenance needs of diverse hospital assets is complicated, resource-intensive, and requires careful attention. Building systems, medical equipment, and infrastructure are in constant use, so they wear out faster and require more frequent maintenance. However, each asset has its own unique maintenance needs, which adds to the complexity of asset maintenance.

More concerning is that any failure can set off a chain reaction with serious consequences. Treatment may be delayed or rescheduled, causing dissatisfaction with patients. Medical procedures may become complicated or carry heightened risk of infection (or worse). Hospitals may also violate compliancy requirements and suffer legal ramifications.

Further, a large number of healthcare assets naturally lead to a high volume of service requests and work orders. Unlike in standard facilities, where work orders may be prioritized by cost and complexity, maintenance work in hospitals must also consider the potential effects on patient care.

Regulatory Compliance and Safety

A 2017 American Hospital Association (AHA) study revealed that healthcare facilities must comply with as many as 629 requirements from the following 4 agencies:

• Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)
• Office of Inspector General (OIG)
• Office for Civil Rights (OCR)
• Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)

Hospitals must also follow other regulations set by the OSHA and state health departments. In addition, healthcare facilities also seek accreditation from organizations such as:

• The Joint Commission
• Accreditation Commission for Health Care (ACHC)
• DNV’s National Integrated Accreditation for Healthcare Organizations

Needless to say, there are an overwhelming number of regulations healthcare facilities must adhere to that are not required in other types of facilities. These regulations are constantly changing to keep up with evolving healthcare concerns.

Healthcare regulatory requirements are stringent, especially when it comes to patient safety, infection control, safety systems, and environmental issues. Facility managers must invest in the proper equipment, training, and documentation systems in order to meet compliancy requirements. This can be difficult with limited budgets and resources. In fact, the AHA estimates that healthcare facilities spend approximately $39 billion each year in order to comply with the administrative aspects of regulatory compliance.

If hospitals are found to be out of compliance, they can be penalized with fines, loss of accreditation, and exposed to legal liability. Therefore, it is critical that everyone involved with hospital facility maintenance and management understands their regulatory obligations and the risks that non-compliance poses to patients, staff, and the hospital at large.

Resource Constraints

As in most industries, budget limitations and staffing shortage pose significant challenges to healthcare facility maintenance. When budgets are constrained, maintenance teams must find ways to lower costs without compromising patient care. This typically comes in the form of optimizing inventory management, prioritizing critical assets for preventive maintenance, reducing energy usage, and adopting lean maintenance techniques such as total productive maintenance (TPM).

In addition to budget constraints, hospital maintenance teams must also contend with staffing shortages. In hospitals, stress and burnout extend to all employees and make potential hires reconsider working in the healthcare field. This is especially true following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Another issue is that the maintenance workforce is getting older and there simply aren’t enough new, qualified people to replace them. Given the compliancy demands, hospitals prefer technicians to have healthcare experience, further limiting the pool of candidates. These labor market forces require hospitals to find ways to attract new hires and retain veteran staff.

Cleanliness and Hygiene

Maintaining clean and infection-free environments presents numerous challenges. On top of regular maintenance duties and compliance requirements, facility management teams must also maintain rigorous cleaning and sanitation standards. Beyond routine cleaning, teams are also responsible for proper waste disposal, infection control, and air quality management. Even factors as seemingly small as making sure there is enough sunlight and ventilation play a role in creating a hygienic, germ-free facility.

These efforts are crucial for reducing the spread of germs and preventing healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), which can lead to severe illness, even death.

Benefits of CMMS for Healthcare Facilities

If not addressed, the challenges we discussed earlier can lead to dire consequences. A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) offers numerous benefits to healthcare facilities, providing the tools needed to tackle these challenges head on. Below are just some of the many benefits hospitals gain from using a CMMS.

Centralize Asset and Inventory Data

A CMMS brings all of your asset and inventory information together in one place, providing you and your team with a single source of truth about your maintenance assets. The system helps you build an asset registry to track equipment individually, ensuring that each piece of equipment receives a maintenance schedule and is accurately documented. CMMS software that supports asset tagging through barcoding allows you to track your assets, their location, and related work orders.

Tracking your inventory in the CMMS helps you quickly locate information about spare parts and tools, such as where they are located, how many are in stock, or who possesses them. Automatic stock updates reduce the likelihood of maintenance tasks being delayed by stockouts and wasting money on unnecessary purchases.

Further Reading: 3 Asset Naming Convention Designs to Consider

Maximize Asset Uptime

Using healthcare maintenance software enables you to implement proactive maintenance strategies. By creating a master preventive maintenance schedule for each asset, you can address potential issues before problems arise. This ensures that critical equipment and infrastructure remains operational without disrupting patient care.

Automatic work order activation and notifications ensure that necessary preventive maintenance work doesn’t fall through the cracks, and that technicians are aware of upcoming repairs. With a proactive mindset and robust maintenance schedule, you can significantly reduce downtime and extend asset life.

Easily Provide Documentation for Audits

Tracking maintenance activities in a CMMS makes it easy to provide the documentation required for maintenance audits. A user-friendly interface makes it easy for technicians to demonstrate how they perform regular tasks such as generating and closing work orders and updating asset records. Using task lists, you can create standard maintenance procedures (SMPs) that include step-by-step instructions and ensure compliance with internal policies and regulatory standards. Some systems even include change log functionality that tracks what changes were made, who made them, and when.

Access Your CMMS On-the-Go

A mobile CMMS bring the power of your CMMS into the hand of technicians wherever they go. Using a streamlined interface, maintenance teams can stay productive no matter where they are throughout the facility, and reduce time otherwise wasted returning to a central office. Barcode scanning capability helps maintenance technicians quickly access asset details, while cameras can be used to provide supplemental visual aids to work orders. Offline modes allow the CMMS to be used in areas with poor or no internet connectivity.

Keep Your Facilities Healthy with FTMaintenance Select

The complexity of healthcare facilities presents numerous challenges not found in other industries, especially as it relates to the patient experience. With so much on the line, it is critical that maintenance teams are equipped to handle the demands of hospital maintenance.

FTMaintenance Select is a comprehensive CMMS solution that provides your team with tools necessary to support the well-being of patients and staff. It centralizes your maintenance data in order to help you improve operational efficiency, implement proactive maintenance strategies, effectively coordinate resources, and simplify documentation practices. Request your demo today to see how FTMaintenance Select keeps your facilities running smoothly.

Read more about FTMaintenance Select benefits for healthcare facilities

Key Takeaways

• Tracking service request management KPIs keeps the maintenance team accountable for providing high customer service.
• Response Time and Turnaround Time are common KPIs for measuring your service request process.
• Despite their simplicity, these KPIs must be looked at in context of your maintenance environment.
• Using these KPIs, you can identify growth opportunities and drive continuous improvement.

Timely and effective resolution of service requests is a critical aspect of maintenance operations in order to reduce asset downtime and increase customer satisfaction. As such, it is important for maintenance organizations to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) for service request management. This article provides an overview of common service request KPIs and discusses how they can be effectively leveraged to improve maintenance operations.

Recommended Reading: What is Maintenance Request System?

Service Request Management KPIs

The service request management KPIs presented in this article are not intended to be a definitive list, but instead are meant to spark discussion about commonly used maintenance metrics. After all, even seemingly straightforward metrics have some underlying nuance worth exploring.

Use this discussion as a jumping off point and work with your key stakeholders to develop KPIs that best align with your organizational and maintenance management goals.

Average Response Time

Average Response Time is the amount of time between when a service request is submitted and when the maintenance team starts executing the requested work. It measures the maintenance team’s promptness in addressing maintenance issues reported by others.

To calculate Average Response Time, first sum up the response times of all service requests that were both submitted and responded to within the reporting period. Then, count the number of these service requests used in the calculation of the sum. Finally, divide the sum of response time by this count to get the average response time. Ensure that response times are expressed in a consistent unit of time, such as minutes, to maintain accuracy.

How to Interpret Average Response Time

Like other KPIs, Average Response Time is most helpful when compared to a benchmark, as it allows you to see whether the metric is improving or declining. Compared to a benchmark, lower values mean response time is short and indicates that the maintenance team is able to deliver timely maintenance assistance.

Higher values mean that it is taking the maintenance team longer to address requests. This could be due to a large backlog, understaffing, poor request processing practices, or other issues.

When measuring Average Response Time, it is important to look at the result in context of your maintenance operations. A number of factors may greatly influence your measurements and give an inaccurate impression of performance if taken at face value. Let’s look at a few scenarios.

Measurements are Skewed by Outliers

When calculating an average, it is easy for outliers to greatly weigh down or inflate the result. For example, think of a product review on popular online shopping websites. On products where most ratings are 3-4 stars, a small number of 1-star or 5-star reviews shift the average lower or higher.

Similarly, some requests take a relatively long time to complete due to complexity, or a relatively short time due to their straightforward nature. These outliers can skew measurements, making the maintenance team look artificially quick or slow to respond. Since these outliers do not reflect your typical response times, you may consider omitting them from the calculation.

Process for Handling Low Priority Requests

Low priority requests will naturally take longer to execute. As we just discussed, these outliers can artificially lower your response time, making the maintenance team appear slow to respond.

In an ideal scenario, service request administrators or reviewers communicate delays back to the original requestor. Some organizations may consider this communication to be the start of request fulfillment, as some work has been put forth in reviewing and prioritizing the request. If this is the case in your organization, this initial review will help control the response times for low priority requests.

Another approach to measuring response time is to limit the calculation to high priority, or medium and high priority, requests. Doing so focuses on your response time calculation on urgent maintenance needs, and ignores low priority, minor requests that may skew results lower. After all, your responsiveness to highly important requests is more apparent to others and leaves requesters with a better impression of the maintenance team.

Turnaround Time

Average Turnaround Time is the duration of time between when a service request is submitted and when the resulting work order is completed. It measure how long it takes for service requests to be processed, from start to finish.

To calculate Average Turnaround Time, sum up the turnaround times of all service requests that were submitted and completed within the reporting period. Then, divide the sum by the number of service requests used to calculate the sum. For greatest accuracy, turnaround times should be expressed in a single unit of time, such as minutes.

How to Interpret Turnaround Time

As mentioned before, turnaround time calculations should be compared against a benchmark. Lower times equate to faster turnaround time and processing, while relatively higher values mean longer turnaround times. As turnaround time reflects customer service and addresses how quickly requests are addressed and completed, maintenance teams aim for low turnaround times.

High turnaround times may be interpreted differently based on whether your organization has a formal request review process, or automatically adds requests to the work order queue. If requests are reviewed before being assigned, first take a look at your process and ask questions like:

• Are all requests coming in through a single channel?
• How quickly are requests reviewed?
• Are there enough reviewers?
• Are requests being properly prioritized?

If there are no process problems, high turnaround times may be due to other factors such as manpower constraints, out of stock inventory, influx of more complex, higher priority maintenance needs, or other issues that prevent the completion of requests.

Improve Your Service Request Process with FTMaintenance Select

As demonstrated, service request management plays a critical role in maintenance management and keeping others within the organization satisfied. By measuring service request management KPIs, you can gain actionable insights into your process or performance.

FTMaintenance Select’s service request management functionality enables you to implement a formal channel for receiving, processing, and communicating about service requests. Request a demo today to learn more.