Drillers, Archers Find CMMS Success

Two real-world examples explain the benefits these software systems offer.

Computerized maintenance management software (CMMS)—or enterprise asset management (EAM) software—is designed to help schedule, plan, manage, and track maintenance activities associated with operational assets. A site’s CMMS tells the story of maintenance, as well as the story of asset health.

The following case studies focus on two companies that achieved maintenance success by partnering with CMMS provider eMaint (Bonita Springs, FL, eMaint.com), and a Fluke Accelix brand company (Everett, WA, accelix.com).

CACTUS DRILLING CO.

According to Oklahoma City-based Cactus Drilling (cactusdrlg.com), it is the largest privately held land driller in the United States. The company’s rigs are located throughout Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. Its assets include engines, pipe-handling equipment, housing controls, and electronics. Before seeking a CMMS to better control its inventory and perform consistent maintenance on its assets, the company managed its maintenance activities manually. Over time, however, given the organization’s continuing growth and associated business goals, it outgrew those old methods.

That growth, along with the increasing need to better manage equipment maintenance, led Cactus to a software solution that improved the way organizations manage maintenance operations, resources, equipment, and compliance. It is primarily used for scheduling maintenance on assets, inventory management, and purchasing. Reports and evaluation of inventory on hand and location of assets are sent to executives to help increase corporate visibility and support decisions on whether to repair, replace, or rebuild an asset.

“We chose eMaint because we did not want to invest into a large IT department to maintain our database,” said Kenneth Boyanton, Cactus Drilling’s CMMS coordinator. “We prefer to keep our operations streamlined, and eMaint’s platform is perfect for that.”

Cactus started with the basics—loading more than 11,000 assets and parts into the CMMS. Once data was entered and cleaned, a preventive maintenance (PM) program was established and purchasing set up. The project was expanded based on the evolving needs of company executives, who desired a flow of information to make more informed business decisions. During the process, eMaint simplified work-request and work-order forms and added drop-down fields to standardize data for reporting. Throughout the implementation, the company continued to partner with the eMaint for support and services.

“eMaint was implemented to relieve the constraints of manual tracking and reporting on equipment assets,” Boyanton noted. “We also needed the ability to do more things like manage a parts inventory and establish a PM program.”

Cactus runs reports on the status of work orders. Criticality ratings are customer driven and generally associated with safety. To date, the company sustains a 100% on-time completion of critical work orders, including those that are tied to compliance. The organization also uses document storage to attach photos and documentation to assets, parts inventory, and work orders. This allows the team to track service tickets and keep a more accurate parts inventory. In this manner, everything is organized and easy to locate within a single system used by multiple departments.

The ease of use with the CMMS has been characterized as a “huge benefit” for the company’s technicians. When on call, they can access information from their phones or home computers. To keep pace with system enhancements, Cactus takes advantage of online training opportunities from the provider, including best-practice webinars and web-based workshops. Technicians also used MX Mobile to perform annual physical inventory checks.

“Most recently, we have continued in the pursuit of being an industry leader, and we are currently using the new eMaint/Fluke relationship to explore opportunities in the area of predictive maintenance and condition monitoring,” Boyanton said. “We appreciate the personal and dedicated level of support that eMaint provides; they really want to help you succeed.”

Hoyt needed a flexible, affordable, user-friendly CMMS that could help plan and track labor and manage archery-product inventory. Photo courtesy Hoyt Archery Co.

HOYT ARCHERY CO.

Founded by Earl Hoyt and Earl Hoyt Jr., in 1931, Utah-based Hoyt Archery Co. (hoyt.com) manufactures bows and archery accessories. Employing a wide array of skilled craftsmen and engineers at its 150,000-sq.-ft. facilities in Salt Lake City, the company produces some of the world’s finest compound and recurve bows.

To maintain its level of high-quality products and services, however, Hoyt needed a flexible, affordable, and user-friendly CMMS system that would help plan and track labor and manage inventory for a department of six technicians who are responsible for maintaining the company’s entire infrastructure and managing more than 400 mission-critical assets. The system needed to be able to take corrective-, reactive-, and preventive-maintenance information and accurately forecast labor requirements to minimize downtime. It also needed to have a friendly reporting interface for tracking key performance indicators. Those requirements led Hoyt to seek out a CMMS solution.

When Rick Groves joined Hoyt in 2009 as facilities and maintenance manager, the site had no CMMS system in place. That situation changed shortly thereafter, when the company began using eMaint’s offering to establish categories for work orders that would allow associated costs to be grouped by department.

“The main reason I chose the eMaint CMMS,” Gates explained, “was the flexibility to design and customize fields and pages to meet the criteria we were looking for when deciding what matrixes we are going to track.”

By tracking downtime, labor, work orders, and maintenance by type, Hoyt was able to build a detailed maintenance history that assisted in determining future maintenance costs. Additionally, most production equipment is designed and engineered in-house at Hoyt. The Bill of Material (BOM) provides the maintenance team with a list of spare parts needed for repairs when the equipment is rolled out to production and tracks the costs of engineering projects. With the help of the CMMS, Hoyt included photos of spare parts to the database, which helped decrease look-up time and improved inventory accuracy.

Hoyt experienced several other benefits after implementing the CMMS, including achieving a better understanding of repair costs for each asset, lower inventory costs, and improved inventory turns because of the auto-replenishment system, and a 77% increase in PM compliance.

“When fully staffed, we are hitting 100% PM compliance,” Groves stated. “My booked labor/reported hours are right in line with my goal of 85%. We have reduced downtime by 50%. Our downtime for 2011 was 6,789 hours, and our current downtime is running at 3,675 hours.”

Groves isn’t stopping there.

“My next project,” he said, “is to implement continuous condition monitoring using the Fluke monitoring devices [vibration, temperature, and power sensors] to identify early component failure. This will give me live data trends directly in our eMaint CMMS system and further minimize downtime.” EP

For more information on the products and services referenced in this article visit emaint.com and accelix.com.