Building resilience: Adapting to remote work, improving health & safety, and more with your CMMS

Due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, it is no longer business-as-usual, and most businesses are having to adapt and learn new ways of operating. For some, this means implementing advanced infection control measures in an effort to maintain status-quo production levels. Others are ramping up production or rapidly retooling to meet increased demand. While others still are turning down production or completely shutting down.

No matter what situation you find yourself in, there are ways your CMMS can help support these new ways of working.

Virtual communication is more important than ever before

We’ve all previously operated under the assumption that nothing beats face-to-face communication. However, during this time of social distancing and high rates of absenteeism, in-person communication is no longer feasible for many situations. Therefore, we all have to embrace virtual communication methods and determine which are the most effective for us.

Your CMMS allows critical information to be communicated with:

• Maintenance coordinators and managers working remotely
• Contractors and vendors who can no longer access your site
• Workers from different departments or on staggered shift changes

CMMS features — like adding asset images, identifying equipment with QR or barcodes, adding files and media to work orders, reporting and shared dashboards — can all enhance your ability to virtually communicate important information.

Communicating new or evolving information quickly

Our collective knowledge of the coronavirus is evolving daily, as are the recommended precautions and impacts to our businesses. Therefore, it is important that business leaders have a way of quickly communicating these changes to workers to maintain their safety.

In Fiix, the task groups feature lets you quickly communicate changes to:

• Highlight updated PPE required for tasks per advanced infection control measures along with instructions on wearing, inspecting, cleaning, and storage.
• Make changes to sanitation procedures or frequency.
• Increase ventilation rates and frequency of air filter changes.
• Ensure detailed procedures and manuals are accessible on each work order in the event of the need to cross-train workers.
• Install new engineered controls such as physical barriers.

In addition, using the available notifications options, you can configure how active and inactive users are automatically notified of changes and new work orders.

Discouraging the use of shared tools

The U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), has published a Guidance on Preparing Workplaces for COVID-19. In this document, OSHA explicitly discourages the use of shared tools, including computers and phones.

A good workaround here is getting your team to use their mobile CMMS app on their own personal device, instead of relying on shared terminals. The Fiix app even facilitates access to your CMMS when the internet connection is unstable or unavailable.

Determining what is essential

By searching and tagging open work orders with the highest priority, you can quickly obtain a hit-list of the essential maintenance items for your facility. This critical information can be shared with business leaders to inform staffing adjustments and highlight any anticipated supply chain issues. This sort of itemized and prioritized communication with management demonstrates the critical role maintenance teams play in overall business continuity planning. In Fiix, you can build scheduled reports to automatically send an updated essential work order list to the appropriate people at whatever interval you want.

Taking the time now, to be faster later

Even if you’re working in a facility where production is currently slowing or shutting down, this may be a good opportunity to take time to sharpen the saw, as the old saying goes, to come back with the ability to cut down the tree much faster.

Reviewing backlogged maintenance tasks, brushing up on your own professional development, or implementing those additional CMMS modules you’ve been meaning to get to are all great ways to set yourself up for success down the road. Beyond the features we mentioned above, here is a great checklist to ensure you’re ready for when your plant starts operating again.

Lean on your Fiix community

We know that these are challenging times for many of our customers, partners, and community in production environments, and that adapting to uncertainty can be complicated. That being said, there is tremendous maintenance expertise within our growing Fiix community, so do not hesitate to reach out to explain other situations you are struggling with. We’re here to help you through.