Creating a Closed Loop Maintenance System for Your Business

By Basant Singhatwadia, VP of IoT Product Strategy, Accruent

With any maintenance solution in place, you do not just want to identify problems; you want an automated process that helps you fix problems.

This means implementing a solution that not only identifies issues, but also streamlines the process for getting the problem resolved.

Most of the remote monitoring solutions on the market today do not integrate with downstream Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) solutions, which makes a closed-loop system nearly impossible. This can cause many problems for the end-user and maintenance teams, and inherently limits the scope of your solution.

When the remote monitoring system and CMMS operate independently, we often see problems like:

• Constant disruptions at the facility caused by remote alerts
• Manual entering of work orders, which can cause the creation of duplicate information
• Poor root cause analysis, causing incorrect or multiple work orders for a single problem

A comprehensive IoT solution should integrate several CMMS solutions and the architecture should also allow additional integrations for other CMMS solutions with ease, requiring less time to set up. This allows for problem identification-to-resolution coverage for your facilities with a closed-loop system that ensures work orders are fixed correctly the first time.

Additional benefits of having an intelligently integrated remote monitoring and CMMS include:

• Work orders are automatically created inside the CMMS
• Improved issue triage to let contractors know the root cause of the issue
• They system can recall a previous work order in case of work not done properly, causing the issue to repeat

By creating a closed-loop system for your maintenance, you are streamlining the process from problem to solution and ultimately making it easier on your maintenance teams to track spending, reduce reactive maintenance and spend more time thinking strategically about your business’s critical assets.

Explore the rest of the “Essentials of an IoT Remote Monitoring Platform” series:

1. Introduction
2. The Importance of Hardware Agnostic IoT platforms
3. Cutting Out Alarm Noise to Focus on Real Issues
4. Creating a System Between Your People and Your Remote Monitoring Platform
5. Creating a Closed Loop Maintenance System for Your Business
6. Stop Reacting: Use Data to Get Ahead of Equipment Failure
7. Gaining Enterprise Control of Your Setpoints For Next-Level Savings