Using data is like solving a puzzle; each puzzle piece is a crucial part of creating a complete picture. However, missing pieces can leave an incomplete or distorted view — like how missing data can misrepresent a business’s maintenance performance.
Missing information leads to false conclusions; often, organizations experience inefficiencies with planning, scheduling, prioritizing, and executing work with inaccurate data. Uncovering missing information is a critical step toward ensuring the validity and reliability of master data. To effectively address this issue, businesses benchmark their EAM master data.
Benchmarking involves identifying issues by comparing EAM master data to industry best practices. Many organizations rely on benchmarking because it provides an accurate view of where their EAM data stands amongst others in the industry and specific areas they should fix.
Here are some areas where businesses usually have missing information; this can be used as a general benchmark to gauge the completeness of master data.
1. Make, model and serial number
When contacting a manufacturer or dealer about a maintenance part, chances are they will ask for the make, model and serial number of the equipment. These numbers are important: model numbers identify a range of dates a unit may be made and potential problems in a specific model; serial numbers are unique to each equipment unit sold and can provide warranty information.
If this data is not readily available on EAM/CMMS systems, maintenance staff will have to find it themselves. Note: a McKinsey study reports that employees can spend up to 20% of their time searching and gathering information.
2. Vendor Documentation
Maintenance personnel require vendor documentation to place orders. However, if kept in a paper record, server or any other disconnected maintenance system, it can be tedious to find documents. So, planners resort to making spreadsheets to reduce the hassle. Yet, they rarely enter it into the work order management system. Without an efficient method to find vendor information, maintenance staff waste valuable time tracking it down.
3. Criticality
Criticality describes how critical an asset is based on its likelihood of failure and the consequences of the failure to the business. Criticality analyses require further historical data on the frequency of failure occurrence and its severity. As a result, criticalities and preventative maintenance plans will be inaccurate if this data is missing or incorrect.
4. Bill of Materials (BOMs)
BOMs are highly detailed documents; it includes a list of different parts in equipment pieces and step-by-step guides on how to use each of them. Patience, expertise, and time are essential to creating BOMs; so, it is not unusual to see unfinished or outdated ones. Consequently, companies put themselves at risk for inefficiencies in ordering parts and inaccuracies in inventory.
Have a ROI Based Plan to Fix Master Data
These are only a few areas to investigate, but issues in EAM data can be unique; finding missing data can be a difficult and time-consuming task. If so, consider HubHead’s benchmarking services.
We evaluate the performance of EAM/CMMS systems against industry best practices. Moreover, we have a level of expertise and industry awareness from working with many companies in various industries; this enables us to create practical ROI-based plans to fix missing EAM data related issues.
Interested in learning more about our benchmarking services? Click on the link below to download our brochure or visit our website. If you would like to talk to one of our consultants, book a meeting — we would be pleased to assist you.
Impacts of Inaccurate EAM Master Data on Maintenance and Operations
How Does Your EAM/CMMS Compare to Others in the Industry?
6 Benefits of Master Data Management
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