eMaint

Avantages: The software comes "out of the box" ready to use on a base level. Customization of fields, forms, and functionality (through workflows and other means) is very simple and the customer support team is always there to help you implement your ideas and goals; outstanding team honestly. The system really excels in helping you track your assets and inventory in a very clean and organized way.

Inconvénients: I have found that even though there is a LOT that can be done in the system to make it work for your specific application, there have been a few limitations in areas that I would have thought would be better. We are on X4 and its still based on their X3 system and certain parts put you back into X3 mode and it can be a little confusing at times, like in the pending POs section, and other parts of the purchasing area in general. There have also been some functionalities of the system that I would have thought would have been standard for workflows of the system but aren't, most though were able to be added to some degree. Also the formatting of reports is clunky and annoying at times; certainly improvements to be done with doing a betting "mass" report publish for things like monthly report and such.

Avantages: Customer support is the best that I have ever experienced. Their support team is well trained in maintenance reliability concepts, so they are quick to understand the unique requirements of your company. Better yet, they share this wealth of knowledge through their very helpful "Online eMaint University". They have various training programs & opportunities & very frequently hold local conferences that focus on both concepts & the software "how to's". The software itself is very powerful. The reports module gets my "most improved" award & is complete with graphs & instruments. If you can dream it, you can run a report on it. You have lots of freedom to customize the software in (most of) the right places so long as you can handle the learning curve or have an aptitude for database management but, out of the box, it should suffice for most companies as you can lean on eMaint support for help with customizing & much more. One of the strongest selling points for this software is that they joined forces with & are now owned by Fluke Corporation & are offering a line-up of Fluke tools that integrate with their software to bring condition monitoring, data analysis & reporting to a whole new level. Another favorite feature of mine is the eMaint Community, where you can post your ideas for new or improved software features or vote on other user's ideas. I get the sense that many of eMaint's feature updates are based on ideas on this forum & I'm glad they are listening to their users.

Inconvénients: eMaint X4 has seemingly been the "beta" of the long awaited eMaint X5 due later this year (2017). The problem is that while X4 has been available & increasingly functional, its been over two years & there has been no official upgrade from X3 to X4 and some modules still exclusively use the old X3 platform that haven't received any upgrades. A specific example is the work order/pm scheduler. X4 is very aesthetically pleasing and functional but navigating from to the scheduler module is a transition comparable to drinking a cool glass of ice water & then choking down a spoonful of sand. As far as functionality of the scheduler, I have tried several times to learn how to use it & each time I walked away wondering why it was ever implemented in the first place. It's difficulty of setup & general usage far outweighs any usefulness it might have. While eMaint has done great with keeping up with updates to most of the modules, they would do well to step it back a bit & get caught up with some key modules that have been neglected for too long. Form design is another key function that could use some attention.

Commentaires: Cardinal CG, Buford Georgia is one of 28 Cardinal Glass facilities manufacturing residential glass products. Upon my joining the Buford plant, the company had not made a profit in five years. The company lacked organization and was not producing product in an efficient manner. Our facility is unique to the other Cardinal plants, because we have two separate manufacturing processes running as separate cost centers. Because of the structure of the company, each cost center has separate support staff (i.e. maintenance, engineering and management). In October 2008, I joined the Cardinal CG Buford location. As Tempering Maintenance Manager, I was challenged with turning the Tempering production side of the operation around. There was no CMMS system in place and no one was tracking the machine downtime. Safety was out of control; there were three accidents in my department in the first two weeks of my accepting the position. Vibration analysis reports were not being reviewed and costly failures were frequent. The department had a shift log book, but the data was not in a format that could easily be put into a database. The Coating Maintenance department was using MP2 for their data collection. In an effort to get a CMMS up and running quickly, I acquired an additional license and began to enter data. After a week or two, I attempted retrieve some of the data in MP2, but the reporting feature had not been installed. I then contacted the CMMS vendor (Mp2) to inquire about reporting my data in the format needed.

After several conversations relating to the reporting within the CMMS, I was told that they could not provide the report that my boss had requested. I offered to purchase the reporting module, but no one attempted to follow up with my request. This is how the search for a new system began. Because my background and interest was in CMMS programs, I began my search on the Internet. I had followed various CMMS over the years, and realized that an investment in a CMMS program could be very costly. As I searched, indicators were leading me toward a cloud-based system.

The criteria for the CMMS was (1) support had to be readily available on all shifts and (2)the cost of implementation had to be low. One of my concerns was transferring the data from MP2 to the new database. Time to implement was critical also. I had to drive the downtime down. My selection came down to E-Maint X3 . The product demo offered online provided all of the initial answers to the questions that would come forth during a selection process for a CMMS. Because it is a subscription-based system, the cost to implement is very low. The implementation of EMaint was simple and very fast. I had total control of the implementation process. The transfer of the data files went without a hitch. I cannot begin to express how well the transition went. One of the greatest strengths of E-Maint is the administrator can change any of the field names or report formats. Unlike other programs where there is a fee each time you make a change to the program, E-Maint allows you to format your database to suit your industry. E-Maint is not just another canned product that you take as-is. Of course when you mention a web based program, management initially will push back because they do not want employees to access the Web. I suggested to E-Maint that they setup an email address for work requests to dump into and then pull the data to a work request form. This has proven to be the answer to get around issues with accessing the Internet. E-Maint provides all of the security levels needed to prevent just anyone from accessing your data. Because of the ability to send request via email, all requests dump to my iPhone and I have put an iPhone on the department golf cart for quick response. Because E-Maint is web-based, I could bring my crew into a conference room and review the program on a weekly basis. The training as a group lasted about 2 hours. The program is user-friendly and the subscription to E-Maint University has proven to assist the technicians in the use of the program. Customer support for the product is second to none. In most cases all of my issues are resolved during the phone conversations. The only real problems that I have experienced with E-Maint are those that I caused myself because of the freedom to change the program. It only takes one phone call to straighten the issue out. Customer Support will provide you a direct line to a technician so that you can work with the same person and build the relationship necessary to help build confidence in the use of the CMMS. Since implementation of E-Maint, we have continued to reduce machine downtime. Once the original CMMS database was functional we established a goal of 5% downtime or 95% UPTIME. Since the implementation of E-Maint we have established a goal of 98% UPTIME and have consistently hit 97.7% and at the time of the most current report we are at 99.34%.

Commentaires: We began searching for a CMMS about 2 years ago. We explored our present CCMS system supplier, trying to get it to communicate with our ERP system, but were dissatisfied with the results. I once found myself in a hour-long conference call with our I.T. director, our ERP in-house person, myself, and our Maintenance Supervisor, speaking to our ERP Consultant, to go over the email I sent previously with a detailed list of questions. At the end of the meeting, it dawned upon me we had spent $250.00 in direct costs to our ERP consultant and wasted several hours of time for each of the individuals listed above in order to get some questions defined that I had already submitted. This was looking like a long and painful road. I began looking around at other systems from other companies, with the idea of using Excel to import into our ERP. The entire concept of SaaS was new to me, and instantly I saw the benefits as if it were made just for us: low initial cost, no server space to hold the program, ease of use on site and off and limited involvement by our overstressed I.T. department. We won management approval, and the system was turned on August 2010. In the year since, we have completed and documented a staggering number of jobs. Our craftsman and contractors use the system basically to justify the hours they have on their timecards or invoices. When a request is submitted, and approved, it is assigned and from there our craftsman self manage their work. Our past system was a home-grown version of Excel, and while it was a first step, its difficulty made it a roadblock to quantify each and every job performed. The implementation of eMaint was easy and involved getting the assets correct as documentation revolves around the asset numbers. Once we knew what we wanted to see, we customized the reports desired from the list of available reports and we were on our way. Daily reports of previous day's activity enables us to see what my direct reports and contractors accomplished. If I ran into program problems with eMaint, I kept a logbook with issues to discuss with eMaint and we emailed, or called, to resolve. Response has been good, and most of our issues are resolved quickly, and if not we keep discussing until we come to a resolution. We have not needed enough support to generate an invoice as of yet. My maintenance team is computer savvy, but we still needed to go over some items from time to time. Once we got over the hump regarding the task of documenting each job, the craftsman were on board. Then when we showed them the job count, and how many jobs each one was doing each month, the increase in self pride was obvious. Now the craftsman ask for work orders for each job they run across, and instead of viewing it as an roadblock, they understand this is a visible validation of their hard work. In addition, having a system as easy to use, and easy to view past history as eMaint is, allows us to look for past clues on how a problem was solved. Additionally, we have a much better PM system in place, allowing us to do things the same way each time we perform a PM evolution. The past year was exciting, interesting, and revealed a lot about this company's maintenance department. We always though we did a good job, but there is a big difference in our upper management's eyes when we now tell them 'Let me show you' instead of 'I feel'. Now we have documentation showing our strengths and our weaknesses. Using eMaint has brought pride to the department, allowed continuity in job plans and PM performance, and allowed us to work on our areas of concern. These were not goals when I began the search for a CMMS system, but since have eclipsed the system itself and really have made us a more efficient department. We are now exploring how to use eMaint in our engineering department and our tool and die department.

Commentaires: The various options for service or help are great. The messaging option is quick and even phone calls are received or return in a very fashionable time. They want the customer to get the best product for their needs.

Avantages: The software allows for easy customization to your needs. eMaint's team of professionals will help you get the product functionality that you desire. The software is adjustable by the property's administrator and does not always need eMaints help. The ease of making tweaks and adjustments allows great adaptability to situations that arise.

Inconvénients: The initial cost and set up was hard to serve to upper management. The overall options for customization can be overwhelming.