Bigfoot

What CMMS software is all about

If you are unfamiliar with the phrase "CMMS,” it’s an acronym for Computerized Maintenance Management Software or System. Whatever you choose to call it, the concept is the same: software that provides asset/equipment management, preventive maintenance, work orders management, inventory control, and predictive maintenance all wrapped up in a single package.

Preventative maintenance

Ben Franklin said it best: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Preventive maintenance (PM) is nothing more than performing routine maintenance to avoid breakdowns and costly repairs due to neglect. It is far less expensive to perform routine preventive maintenance rather than corrective maintenance due to equipment failure.

With Bigfoot you can schedule PMs any way you want—hourly, by the day, week, month, quarter, semiannually or annually. Or schedule them based on mileage or triggered by a meter reading. PM work can never slip thru a crack; every time you enter Bigfoot it shows you a list of the PM work that needs to be done that day. And it will issue ongoing reminders until you acknowledge and sign off that the work is complete.

PM reminders have detailed instructions, pictures, diagrams, documentation, responsible staff, and other information associated with them. You can even have your PM work on a handheld or PDA so that as you walk around the facility you always know what PM work you need to do.

Work Orders & Maintenance Requests

Work order software tracks ongoing "corrective maintenance" or other work order issues throughout your facility. For example, if someone reports a broken faucet, you can open up a work order (WO) and track it from start to finish, assuring you the repair has been made and providing a history of the work for research, liability protection, and predictive maintenance purposes.

Benefits of using Bigfoot for work order management:

• Organizes and tracks all ongoing corrective maintenance—without notes to yourself, odd scraps of paper or the need to remember details.
• Gives maintenance staff detailed information on work assignments.
• Lets you go back and review all past work orders.
• Can help protect you, your staff and your company from liability claims. You can show what work was done when, how and where should there ever be a question.
• Provides invaluable information on past work for predictive maintenance analysis.

Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance uses the history generated by past work to help you identify future maintenance issues and needs and predict when preventive action should be taken. Some predictive maintenance is easy—if you know that a certain piece of equipment fails about once a month, logic tells you it will fail again next month. But some equipment fails on an irregular basis or fails based on usage or component wear. There’s no way to track this information in your head or predict the next failure without detailed analysis. But Bigfoot can.

Better predictive maintenance pays off with significant benefits. It can help you:

• Plan preventive maintenance more effectively;
• Extend the life of equipment;
• Identify good equipment vendors from bad;
• Perform capital asset planning;
• Make “repair or replace?" decisions; and
• Quickly and easily summarize the maintenance "health" of your operation.

Inventory

Bigfoot includes detailed yet easy-to-use Inventory control software. Whether this is one of your primary needs or a function you’d like to utilize later on, Bigfoot’s Inventory module is ready when you are.

It can help with a variety of tasks including:

• Physical spare part counts
• Ordering by supplier with suggested orders based on par levels, reorder points, and quantities on hand
• Tracking waste and possible theft
• Streamlining the ordering process by integrating inventory with work orders; as you use parts in a work order, they are decremented from inventory.
• Better supplier/vendor management