Professionals in asset-heavy industries face many day-to-day challenges with maintenance operations, including unnecessary downtime, decreased labor efficiency, low visibility into work orders and low asset lifecycle.

Reactive maintenance practices and outdated legacy systems can exacerbate these concerns, making it difficult to track asset histories, schedule PMs or effectively execute preventive maintenance.

To efficiently address these concerns, Accruent has released Maintenance Connection CMMS system. Now, Maintenance Connection v8.9 – the latest evolution of Maintenance Connection available to on-premise customers – offers exciting new added functionality. These improvements can help asset-heavy businesses to effectively reach overarching goals and:

  • Increase equipment lifespan
  • Pinpoint and reduce asset downtime
  • Increase mechanic utilization
  • Establish common metrics for multi-site reporting
  • Automate reports and KPIs
  • Establish unique preventive maintenance schedules

 

New Maintenance Connection v8.9 Functionality

PM Generation Boost

Effective preventive maintenance is the key to any successful CMMS implementation, allowing for streamlined operations and increased ROI.

Companies with ineffective preventive maintenance will see costly consequences, including reduced safety, increased unplanned downtime and reduced asset lifecycle. They’ll also have lower visibility into parts inventory and work order history, and they will fail to consistently focus on high-priority work.

With effective preventive maintenance, on the other hand, business see benefits like:

  • Increased efficiency
  • Reduced equipment downtime
  • Data-driven insights
  • Effective budgeting
  • Prioritized work orders
  • Organized assets across devices
  • Effectively managed teams

To help strengthen such capabilities, we’re enhancing the automated generation of preventive maintenance work orders to speed up generation time. Now, PM generation can be anywhere from 2 to 10 times faster than it was previously, depending on configuration and other variables.

This makes it even easier for businesses to create work orders, prioritize them, and gather any data they need for bigger-picture insights.

More Control Over Audit History

A CMMS can help maintenance departments better meet safety initiatives and comply with regulatory, industry, geographic and other audits:

  • Keep an accurate and searchable record of all tasks so inspectors can quickly verify actions and maintenance history can be audited stress-free.
  • Maintain employee compliance and safety by embedding training videos and creating user profiles where certifications and renewal dates can be monitored easily.
  • Easily provide the proof required to achieve ISO certification with archived work orders, task lists and photos attached to work orders.
  • Use automated reports and searchable audit logs to track key metrics and quickly pull up any necessary information about a particular asset.

Two new preferences have been added that give customers even more control over how many record changes are kept in audit history. Previously, audit history was capped at 500,000 record changes. Now, customers can raise that ceiling using time or record-based retention policies to meet their particular audit history needs and to ensure that they always have the right information at hand to maintain compliance.

Require Reading Before Completing a Task

A top-tier CMMS tool can help give you peace of mind when it comes to the health of your team and the safety of your assets by:

  • Providing straightforward, easily accessible safety requirements for every job
  • Simplifying audit logs
  • Making safety procedures more accessible
  • Allowing those in charge to track safety training
  • Ensuring that work orders are completed with all appropriate safety measures in mind

With this latest feature update, users can now be required to record readings for meters or specifications before marking a work order task as complete. This additional check can help ensure that there are no oversights when it comes to asset function and process validation that the work has been appropriately completed. In the big picture, this can improve plant safety and uptime.

 

Product Enhancements

Maintenance Connection v8.9 also includes over 70 enhancements and fixes to the Maintenance Connection, MC Express and the Maintenance Connection API.

These include:

  • API improvements for more accurate asset document record-keeping
  • Asset improvements for improved search and organization
  • Maintenance Connection Import Tool improvements to better organize part vendors
  • Various MC Express improvements and fixes
  • Improves Password Management

View the Full Release Highlights.