Working for an SME and your Maintenance Team are Fire Fighters?

The maintenance department for a SME can be a tough place to work. SMEs have limited resources and expertise in comparison to large companies. Typically it can be small team trying to cover every aspect of a plant or facility, from a broken CNC machine to a leaking roof. For a SME, maintenance is not often at the top of any plan. SMEs in general suffer from a problem of limited resources, which means management aren’t spending too much time reflecting on strategy and forward planning — they are too busy trying to hit the sales target and get through the month. In such cases, staff are often covering multiple roles. Sound familiar?

I faced the exact scenario above with the exception that I am a strategic thinker (my personality type is INTJ if you were wondering about that claim) and set putting in a structured maintenance program, a set of critical spare parts, record keeping to ensure we didn’t lose too much knowledge when someone left the company, a method to monitor and track all the work that has to be done, a system that could be used across our multiple sites, asset records that would allow us to dig into the history and perhaps one day even get some performance and analysis reports. When you are in fire-fighting mode not many people will want to listen to performance analysis – sounds a bit far-fetched and even if we have it, what are going to do differently? And of course, there is no time for those “nice to have” things, we are too busy trying to get something back up and running…TODAY!

So this is where the story starts. I started looking for maintenance software that can easily be deployed in the cloud and would take care of my wish list. Then I looked at the market of CMMS providers and found a lot of expensive, complex systems that were way out of the budget, but also seemed far too complex for an SME to start out on and then there were the training costs, and the annual support contracts to boot. They were for companies in with advanced maintenance management and had resources to spend time working with such systems. For a SME, it needed to be simple, it needed to have a realistic budget and it needed to be so easy to use that staff would enjoy using it. It needed to be reliable because there is no IT department to monitor servers, provide updates and ensure the backups are in place. It needed to give management visibility into maintenance, give maintenance the ability to monitor their own performance and provide enough data to work with to analyse plant reliability. I drew a blank.

Then I found the answer... just make one ourselves and it will be exactly what we wanted! That was in 2013 and the idea has developed into a commercial product called Smartspanner, because maintenance is built from generic principles. We took the shopping list that we felt represented a typical SME in manufacturing and got to work with some really good software developers to build a product specifically for SMEs.

Smartspanner is a cloud hosted maintenance management tool that was designed with SMEs in mind and even multi-site, multi-national SMEs. Visit www.smartspanner.com today and see what our solution looks like and if its the right step for your company to take to get out of fire fighting mode.