As the new year begins, it becomes necessary to take care of planned maintenance management inspections. That's why you should revise and extend the schedules of existing inspections or include some new inspection definitions.
A good planned and preventive maintenance ensures that your equipment is ready and always running, while reducing the risk of unexpected downtime and costs. In this article, we will cover the details within the Singu FM’s Planned and Preventive Maintenance (PPM) module allowing you to schedule inspections the right and easy way.
The Key Takeaways from the Article
Carefully prepare the inspection checklists
– Make sure that you divided them into smaller sections to make them more reasonable. When you have a checklist assigned to your inspection it's much easier for the people to track the progress of your check-ups and it makes the whole process much clearer.
Get your maintenance cycle right
– Don't plan your inspection five years ahead. Instead, consider using the automatic extension function. In general, don't generate like 100 or 1000 inspections at once, just use the automatic extension functions.
Set the entire department as responsible whenever possible
– It's always better to have more people set as responsible for a given inspection. This way you will avoid the downtimes and delays on your property.
Set the reminder notification according to the inspection specifics
– There's no need to set a reminder in case of daily or weekly inspection, however, it might be very handy for those less frequent to remember about them.
Consider automatic inspection extension
– This way you and your team will never forget about extending inspections and streamline your work.
Support for external service providers
– Don't be afraid to cooperate with vendors. Singu FM supports such cooperation, and you should feel completely safe by giving access to the application to external services.
What is the Inspection Definition?
Let’s remind that each inspection definition describes a set of inspections, and within each inspection definition you can specify the number of inspections, how frequently the maintenance is performed, e.g., monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, or annual, and more. One inspection definition refers to one type of building inspection.
How to Extend the Existing Maintenance Schedules?
During your work with the maintenance management inspections module, you might have encountered a situation in which your inspection definition got expired and you would like to extend this definition for another cycle. How to quickly extend the completed inspection using CMMS maintenance software? The process is very intuitive.
The very first thing that you need to do is go to Singu FM’s Inspection definitions menu, and select the checkbox “Include closed and cancelled”. This checkbox when enabled displays a list of both open and closed or cancelled inspections.
To extend the inspection which has been done or expired, you need to open its card with all inspection details. This is the place where you can find a button “Extend”.
After selecting this button, the system will automatically suggest you a new inspection cycle end. The suggested cycle relates to the cycle of the original inspection. For example, if the original inspection was scheduled for six months, the system suggests you extend the cycle by another six months. Of course, this field is fully customizable so you can change this date as you wish. After saving the changes there will be newly opened inspections.
How to Automatically Extend Inspections?
To avoid manually extending your inspections each time the cycle comes to an end, there is a better option to automate this process.
In the inspection definition details, you can select an additional option that extends the inspection automatically after the due date of the last one. With this checkbox enabled, once the last inspection in your cycle comes to an end, Singu FM will automatically generate a new cycle for your inspections.
How To Create a New Inspection Definition
You already know how to easily extend audits that have come to an end using Singu FM. However, sometimes it is necessary to create a new inspection. How to do it? During this paragraph, you will learn how to create an inspection definition and some good practices you can follow when creating those definitions.
The new definition creator is intuitive and includes some fields to fill in such as:
- Inspection definition name
- Complex to which you want to assign the inspection
- Building
- Responsible party (a selected user or the whole department responsible for the inspection)
- Optionally, you can also assign a or an external service provider to the inspection
- Inspection category and type
- Inspection duration and time
- Inspection checklist
- Inspection cycle - details on how often the inspection should be generated, when the cycle starts and ends, or how many days before inspection should be sent a reminder
What Are Best Practices in Scheduling Planned Maintenance Inspections?
Now, it’s time for some good practices regarding adding a new inspection definition.
- #TIP 1 While adding the inspection definition name, it is recommended to include here also the information about the cycle of inspection. It might be helpful while browsing through the inspection definition list.
- #TIP 2 Another important field when creating an inspection definition is to choose the responsible party. Singu FM gives you an option to either choose an individual person or the entire department. The recommended option is to always assign the technical department or other departments according to your workflow. By doing this, you can avoid further problems such as downtimes or delays in case the party responsible is not present at the facility.
- #TIP 3 Another great practice to follow is to create those inspections whenever it's possible for an entire year with the option of automatic extension.
- #TIP 4 While creating a new inspection definition it is also possible to set a reminder. It defines how many times before the inspection a user will receive an email notification. In case of maintenance that is frequent (daily or weekly inspections), you can consider leaving this reminder field empty. Regarding quarterly or annual inspections, for which the party responsible needs to properly prepare, it is suggested to set the reminder at a higher number, for example, 10 days before.
What is an Inspection Checklist?
Inspection checklists play a key role in smooth and safe business operations. They can be used across all industries and are an essential management tool for various real estate professionals. A checklist helps to determine whether a process, procedure, piece of equipment, or facility conforms to governmental, industry, or internal standards.
Clear and effective inspection checklists can help ensure that your company's assets are inspected properly, protecting your personnel and resources and being sure that your assets are safe to use.
The inspection checklist using planned maintenance software might be divided into smaller sections. This way it's easier to keep track of all checklist items to be ticked off and gives a more professional look to the whole checklist.
The checklists can be custom edited. While adding a new you can:
- Define the task name,
- Select the task type, for example, checkpoint, rating, numeric, execution, and more,
- Pick a section to which the task should be assigned,
- Or create a new section on the checklist.
Assigning Tenants and Vendors to the Inspection
You might be afraid and sometimes don't want to give access to your maintenance management software to external companies. These companies might have access to sensitive intellectual property data that they should not see. Thankfully it is not a problem. Singu FM is developed to connect various users and real estate professionals in one mobile CAFM/CMMS app, and every type of user has access to only those data that he or she should view. For example, in the case of assigning a subcontractor as responsible for a given inspection, such a company from the perspective of their Singu FM account will access only those inspections to which they have been assigned.
The same goes for tenants. So, if you would like to involve your tenant in the inspection and give him access to such inspection to track its progress, then you can also include your tenant in the definition. Additionally, once the inspection is closed, the tenant might have the possibility to download the protocol from such inspection.
Another scenario worth considering is when you operate with external service companies. It’s a common thing that external service providers don't always want to any software system. Another case is when they visit your facility only once a year. In that situation, there's no real need for them to use any additional software. To solve this issue, you can create such an inspection on behalf of such service provider, let them do their work, and once the inspection is being completed such service will be able to hand you the protocol from the inspection as proof that the inspection has been performed. Next, you can upload the protocol documents into the Singu FM system so that you have the documentation securely stored in one place.
Annual Planned and Preventive Maintenance Reports
Another very useful feature of Singu FM and its PPM module is the annual report. It is an interactive report where you can view all the inspections that have been planned for an entire year. All the data is shown in the form of the interactive grid where each square represents a single week of the year.
Finally, Singu FM is integrated with various IoT sensors, like beacons or NFC tags. NFC tags treated as checkpoints located in different places of the facility might be helpful, for example, during security or cleaning rounds. With NFC tags it is possible to track employees’ movement and be sure that the round was complete. Additionally, these NFC tags might be assigned to individual equipment assets or to entire inspection definitions even, so it's a great way to visualize the data and streamline the maintenance management procedures.
Final Thoughts
(Effective) scheduling and performing planned maintenance activities is the best way to avoid unexpected downtimes and costly repairs and prolong the life of your assets. Starting the new year with a strict maintenance checklist is the best time to get it done.
Do you want to boost your facility and maintenance management?
Would you like to learn more how to improve your planned and preventive maintenance?
Feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns you might have. Request a Singu FM demo and try out the Inspection module.
