"Reengineering strives to break away from the old rules about how we organize and conduct business. It involves recognizing and rejecting some of them and then finding imaginative new ways to accomplish work."
- Dr. Michael Hammer (one of the founders of the management theory of Business process reengineering)
When most organizations decide to implement a new computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), they do so as a means of organizing and automating long standing processes. To a point, this will speed them up and lead to a marginal increase in productivity and customer satisfaction. However, to realize great improvements in performance, reengineering old processes is the only way to break free from the status quo. The point of reengineering is to examine and restructure processes to best support the end goal of the service or operation.
There are 7 principles to reengineering:
1. Organize work around its end results, not tasks
2. Capture data only once when it is first created
3. Allow decision points where work is performed
4. Incorporate controls into information processing
5. Make people who use a process do the work
6. Work in parallel instead of sequentially and later integrate the results
7. Treat geographically dispersed resources as one
Learn more about the 7 Principles
Ideally, Maintenance Managers should strive to eliminate non-value or duplicated tasks so employees can focus more of their time on core responsibilities, like delegating work orders, completing maintenance jobs, and verifying completed work. The key to unlocking great improvement with a CMMS system is to actually use the tools it provides and like Dr. Hammer states, "..find imaginative new ways to accomplish work." Most CMMS owners fail to use CMMS software to it's full potential, causing them to question its value and subsequently failing to see its usefulness.
Read this article on the 7 Top Reasons CMMS Software Fails.