Most people see the use of maintenance management software as reserved for companies, factories, plants, oil rigs, mines, and other industries that operate a large fleet of vehicles, use heavy equipment and machinery and require a big roster of technicians for maintenance, repair, and upkeep.

With such a view, it is easy to see why most small and medium enterprise operators don’t include or even think to invest in maintenance software for small business. The reality is that small businesses can benefit so much from maintenance management systems. The advantages these platforms present can really impact a small business’ efficiency and productivity, and ultimately its growth and profitability.

1. Create and Implement Schedules for Preventative Maintenance

Computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) provides you with tools to automate the scheduling of maintenance, inspections, and audit of all your vehicles, equipment, and other assets in your inventory. A simple CMMS for small businesses should include an adequate set of automation features to take the burden of creating and implementing schedules for preventive maintenance.

Preventive maintenance gives your business a huge boost. For one, it prolongs the service life of your assets. You get to maximize the performance of your equipment, machinery, and vehicles. Two, preventive maintenance results in substantial savings in repair costs. Three, you are able to track your assets’ service history, enabling you to determine when to retire/dispose of your assets and map out a plan to acquire new ones at the perfect time.

2. Eliminate Paperwork

There are many ways a CMMS can help. Eliminating paperwork is one of them. Maintenance management entails a lot of paperwork. That said, the entry of maintenance management systems has almost completely taken the need for paper-based reporting out of the picture.

Majority of CMMS is built with powerful features that enable the quick storage, access, and sharing of data. These features include automated data capture, instant reporting, and image/video capture. Image capture is specifically highlighted in a list of major CMMS benefits to a small business.

All information is centralized and synchronized across departments and devices. Any change or update to the information automatically reflects across your entire organization. Everything is digital and transparent, rendering paper-based auditing, reporting, and other tasks completely obsolete.

3. Allocate Resources, Equipment, and Manpower Efficiently

Having a small business maintenance management software helps you see clearly into your schedules and work orders in real-time. You know which tasks are being worked on at any given time and which ones are waiting in the pipeline.

The software helps you assign your resources, equipment, and manpower efficiently, ensuring that each task is well-addressed with the proper number of assets and expert hands while maintaining optimum performance.

It prevents you from designating 10 air conditioning technicians to the field when just one is enough for the job. Or using spare parts on a non-performing asset when a highly business-critical truck is in need of such spare parts.

4. Reduce Downtime and Overtime

When your field agents can’t come to a client’s location because either their service truck is scheduled for repairs and there is no other vehicle or team available, your business is bleeding money and losing your client’s trust at the same time. When your employees have to work for a few more hours because you’re behind schedule due to an equipment malfunction, your losing money in overtime costs.

Unexpected shutdowns, downtime, and overtime are costly for your business. While these can’t be avoided, a decent CMMS for small business will help you plan and schedule downtime and overtime well ahead and keep potential losses to a minimum. The software will provide you a clear picture of all your assets and their health, giving you an idea when to schedule a potential downtime and activate mitigation measures to soften its impact on your business.

5. Increase Safety in The Workplace

Keeping your fleet, machinery, equipment, and other assets in good condition makes your workplace a whole lot safer. A missing gasket, faulty brakes, and leaking pipes can cause serious damage to the workplace.

Faulty or obsolete equipment, as well as the lack or non-use of industry-approved assets, devices, and spare parts, are among the leading causes of work-related injuries and fatalities.

Deploying a CMMS for your business helps you monitor your assets and empower you to invest in equipment, devices, and machines that have satisfied the specific standards and regulations of your industry. It also compels you to observe occupational safety standards and procedures.

Occupational hazards do exist. Yet when you operate in compliance with safety regulations, you greatly reduce the risks in the workplace. Thus, it inspires confidence and productivity in your workers, knowing they are operating a well-functioning machine that is on par with industry standards.

A Worthwhile Investment

Expensive CMMS pricing is one of the few hindrances in the adoption of computerized maintenance management systems among small businesses and medium enterprises. A 2018 maintenance study by Plant Engineering revealed that while 53% of facilities implement CMMS for maintenance management, the other 47% said maintenance management systems are too costly.

One can argue that SMBs don’t invest as much in fleets, heavy machinery, and large assets as compared to their corporate and industrial counterparts. Hence, the need for a CMMS is not paramount. However, maintenance management is a core facet in any business operation, regardless of size and industry.

As your business grows, you will need to acquire additional assets, devices, and resources to keep up with your customers and their demands. Thus, maintaining your assets in tiptop shape and extending their service lives are in the best interest of your business. A CMMS can do that and more. It may be a significant investment on your part, yet it is a worthwhile investment that will yield great benefits in the long run.

Used by a range of service industries our Job Card Management Software is part of a larger ERP, CRM and CMMS system.

High Level Features and Interoperation

The feature rich functionality of the software suite was designed according to customer requirements to provide a workflow that drives productivity and enhances efficiency. Many configuration options provide the ability to tune its operation to satisfy a wide range of user specific requirements enabling a custom fit per site.

Service Desk

A Service Desk designed specifically for organisations in the service industry provides a centralised communication hub and location to co ordinate tasks in a manageable and efficient manner. The PFIM Service Desk is part of the same ERP system and integrates seamlessly with the Job Card Management Software.

Mobile Application

The suite of applications also includes a Mobile Application for Technicians to extend the reach of management into the field. Many of the activities of the mobile workforce are controlled and triggered from the ERP, CMMS and Service Desk systems. The information introduced into the system from the mobile app becomes an important part of the job card and job costing system record of events including sign off, service history and expenses.

The system takes ownership of Jobs that have been generated by various other “integrated modules” namely:

• Contracts Module – schedules (along with an accompanying Job Card)  are generated on a monthly or weekly basis from a pre configured schedule of services.
• Quotations Module – quotations can be converted into Job Cards transferring required information to the Job Card and optionally preparing a bill of material from the list of items on the Quotation.
• Service Desk – the service desk can generate Job Cards based on calls that have been logged in respect of  call outs, requests for quotations, faults logged by technicians.
• Mobile Application – the mobile application can now log a call out in a similar manner to the service desk. The system is configured to automatically generate a job card from the call that is logged by the mobile application.
• Activities that trigure threshold violations – all data logging whether by technicians via the mobile application or by data logging IoT devices can cause a threshold to be violated. Examples include high or low pressure, high or low temperature, geolocation, odometer readings. The threshold violation then causes a Job Card to be generated to rectify or attend to the violation. The Job Card could be for regular service or maintenance or to repair or replace a failed component.

Job Costing

In addition to managing the units of work embodied in each job – the PFIM Job Card Management Software also correlates the expenses coming from materials (all goods procured for a job), time expended by employees or sub contractors and travel expenses defrayed in order to transport human resources to the location of the job.

Material Expenses

The materials expenses can be issued by a storeman from stock (inventory) to a Job Card. Where the issue involves serial numbered items that are required to be tracked – the system will prompt for the specified quantity of serial numbers to be captured or selected. These serial numbers are now linked to the customer or site that the Job Card has been opened against. This event and all future service or break down job cards that refer to these serial numbers will form part of that serial number’s service history.

Alternatively a purchase order can be created directly from the Job requiring the goods. Purchase orders follow a process and access rights must be allocated to the user to permit creating or requisitioning a purchase order as well as separate rights to approve or generate or print the purchase order. The PFIM Job Card Management Software ensures that this purchase order is linked to the specific job that it was created from. This way invoices from suppliers and the goods are allocated to the job card when the goods arrive. Outstanding purchase orders are shown in their own section of the Job Card Progess Costing report. Partial deliveries are handled as backorders within the Purchase Order module.

Labour Expenses (Time)

Labour expense can be entered onto the Jobs from the PFIM Time Sheets system. This system enables control to be maintained over working hours and productivity of the human resources of the organisation. Each employee (human resource) has a billing code (their Employee Number from the PFIM HR system and / or Stock code) that is used to manage and apportion their hours to various Jobs. Using this system ensures that each employee accounts for a certain amount of time per work week (or other period).

Time can be charged to external Jobs or internal Jobs (such as Annual Leave, Sick Leave, Training etc) – this time is then “posted” to the Job Costing system on a periodic basis once your organisations controls and batch checks have been performed. Various reports are available from the Time Sheets system to assist with managing the time and cost aspects of human resources and Job Cards and projects. Labour expenses are displayed in their own expense categories in the Job Card Progress Costing report within the Invoiced Items and or the Work in Progress sections.

Travel Expenses

Travel expenses are issued to the Job Cards by way of Purchase Orders where an order has been made out for air tickets, bus tickets or other bought in travel expenses.

Where travel expenses have been incurred by staff and reimbursed – these expenses are allocated to Job Cards in a similar manner to non stock items.

Job Card Management Software – Job Card Progress Costing Report

The key Job Costing report is the Job Card Progress Costing report.

It is recommended to generate this report before invoicing a Job as it details all the financial segments of a Job or Project namely :

The Quoted Amount

Invoices that have been generated against this Job. Often large projects have several draw down Invoices against the quoted or tendered amount.

A Total is drawn from these Invoices and the amount still to be invoiced is displayed.

The next section lists the Job Card Items (costs allocated to the Job Card) that have been invoiced in the section above. These costs are grouped by expense category. eg. Electrical, Ducting, Consumables, Labour, Travel etc.

A profit to date is displayed taking the Total of Invoices to Date less the Invoiced Items.

The next section lists the Work In Progress. This is all the Job Card Items (costs allocated to the Job Card) that have not been invoiced yet. These costs are grouped in a similar manner to the Invoiced Items section above.

The next section lists and totals all the Purchase Orders that have been made ut for the Job Card that have not yet been allocated or issued to the Job Card. These items may not have been dispatched by suppliers yet or may have been received into stock (inventory) but not yet issued to the Job Card.

The final section is the Profit to date against Budget.

Job Card Management Software – Invoicing (Billing) Job Cards

Depending on how the system is configured and choices made by the users, various different layouts and styles of invoices are able to be generated from the system. Job Cost Centres can be configured to use their own invoice layout. An invoice for a break down job need not have all the details that are useful for a long term project where life to date values are useful to both parties.

All stationery is customised for the site so that each site can be unique and maintain their corporate image and layouts.

Less formal (can be combined with the layouts specified for each Job Cost Centre if the layout permits) options include:

• Detailed Invoice – all items on the Job Card are included on the invoice with the selling prices of each Job Card Item being the selling price specified on the invoice line item (clearly not suitable for long term projects but ideal where customers have requested detailed information on their invoices for smaller Jobs like services or break downs)
• Summary Invoice – all items are totalled – this total is used for the single line summary that is displayed on the invoice. The Job Card details (original instruction) or the Technicians notes can be utilised for summary text.
• Summary Hybrid – the single line summary as above is used but all the Job Card Items are added to the invoice as zero value items so that the customer is still informed of the time, travel and materials used on the job.

Invoices then belong to the Debtors system within the PFIM ERP system and are used for generating cusotmer statements etc.