This is my first ever post so hope I’m doing this right. I am trying to find out how CMMS users out there relate Work Orders to costs on worker’s timesheets.

To explain, I work in small town local government maintaining roads, bridges, drinking water, sewers, drainage, sports grounds, buildings, (ie. mainly civil maintenance). Our existing CMMS is antiquated and did not create Work Orders. We are evaluating a new work order CMMS package which allows one (and only one) activity type and asset on each Work Order. The proposed CMMS is to be integrated to a separate Finance package which has a payroll module for timesheet entry. The CMMS software vendor insists that to capture costs of each maintenance job, the staff must put each Work Order number on their weekly timesheets plus (obviously) the amount of materials, labor and vehicle time spent on each job. Is this how everyone else out there uses Work Orders to capture costs?

We generate about 2000 jobs per month and my bosses are concerned about the potential for maintenance crews to be confused with so many Work Order numbers out there in use. One crew might attend 15 different jobs each day, thus they need to put 15 different numbers on their timesheet each day. Our organization is small and administrative support to issue and track Work Orders will be meagre. Mobile computing to issue work orders to crews is not an option yet. I wondered how others have dealt with this issue?

This is really a question about change management I suppose. Maybe my crews just have to get used to managing new job numbers on their timesheets for every job they do. Any advice greatly appreciated. Sorry if this question seems naive, I am new to CMMS.

Elle,

In my opinion there are a few items that need to be considered and I can only comment on my experience on the matter and please note that it may not be the best practice and the best practice may not be the best practice for you. You are certainly correct that change management may be the most important part of your situation. That being said, here is my opinion on the subject:

All maintenance hours need to be accounted for to the appropriate work order. It has been my experience that if you do not have a business rule of all hours being recorded, you will ultimately have a system that will yield you labor hours that you can not trust.

Your comment about admin support is certainly a valid concern, but if you are going to have a system that allows you to control work and analyze performance, then I personally do not see another way. Ultimately, it all comes down to how strong your work flow processes are and ease of use. A good CMMS and a good work flow should not require a alot of admin support, but will definitely requires the appropriate amount. The requirement for each employee to put a work order number on a timesheet certainly sounds like you are in the process of putting a system in that will difficult to administer due to the number of work orders you are talking about. Sounds like you are talking about a pending tough situation.

We have about 80 maintenance techs putting 100% of their time to all of the work orders that they work on. They input time at the end of each day directly into the CMMS and takes them less than 5 minutes to enter their time. Their foremen review and approve their time either once per day or once per week and they are paid based on this time entry. This results in a combined total of about 33 to 40 manhours per week or about .4 to .5 manhours per man per week as a cost of doing business the way we currently are structured. Therefore, we lose the equivalent of 1 person per year for the time entry function. We are in the process of implementing a more automated time system, but I do not know how it will impact us yet. (it is being implemented as part of another initiative not focused on reducing the cost of time entry in the CMMS.)

Basically, it comes down to what you are trying to acheive out of the system and what makes the most sense for your situation. I know that this probably does not help you much, but I always appreciate any feedback that I get...

Elle that's a great first (or 50th, or 100th) post. Although in my company we pay the workers by clock-punched hours, not by documented hours in the orders/timesheets; we do require to record all costs (labor, materials, rental equipment, contractors, etc.) for the job in the job's maintenance order, and we also have the Maintenance Supervisors checking the daily timesheets. We even have "dummy" maintenance orders to record time expent in other work activities that are not maintenance related. For example, training; if a mechanic has to attend to a mandatory Safety Training that will take two hours of his shift, he documents two hours spent at maintenance order 999900 which is the training maintenance order which is open for all the year. At a comments area he/she will document training details such as Topic and Instructor. At end of year the training maintenance order is closed and a new one is created for next year.

2000 Maintenance Orders per month, I think that alone can justify a clerk to assist you with the paperwork and data entry.

Thanks for advice people, very helpful. Sounds like DAILY timesheets are the best method. Admin support would certainly help as I don’t want to tie up the foremen in front of a PC all day – that’s not their job. Equally important is commitment to the system from the bosses further up the line.

Did either of you go through this implementation process at your workplace or were Work Orders already in place when you got there? The few people I have discussed this issue with suggested a staged implementation – start off getting a small group going with Work Orders who already have a fairly predictable workload (say, Buildings Maintenance). Later on expand to all crews.

Our current system is to enter unchanging ‘cost centre’ numbers onto timesheets and these numbers correspond broadly to activities. This info goes into the Finance system. Our old CMMS is used separately to record details of (i) the asset involved, (ii) the activity and (iii) the accomplishment (after-the-fact of course). Advantage is the timesheet entry stays simple with few errors and at least we know approximate unit rate each week (= $$$ in ‘cost centre’ divided by weekly accomplishment for same activity). Disadvantage is we don’t know exact cost per job.

With our proposed new system we would have less Work Orders floating out there if we could put multiple assets and/or multiple activity types on each Work Order? Do any software systems do this?