The maintenance department is no longer just about making emergency repairs. Organizing data from equipment inventory has become essential for effective preventive management. Here’s an analysis with Corim solutions.
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- Selecting and effectively gathering data in the field
- The equipment park, the backbone of data
- Excel: an accessible but limited tool
- From KPIs to decision-making
The role of the maintenance department has evolved. Once seen as a cost center, it now supports production to enhance and increase output. This shift relies on the reliability of data that informs decisions.
However, many companies still operate on a reactive basis, dealing with emergencies and scattered information across Excel spreadsheets, emails, and paper records. Structuring and exploiting this data can shift operations from fire-fighting to controlled preventive maintenance. Corim solutions, a software publisher and integrator of CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) since 1996, explains how to effectively implement this maintenance strategy.
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Selecting and effectively gathering data in the field
Organizing maintenance data begins before choosing the tool. Objectives such as reducing production stoppages, anticipating breakdowns, cutting maintenance costs, managing spare parts, or reporting indicators to management each guide the data to be collected and organized.
Once the goal is set, the quality of data collection becomes crucial. This often involves mobility, as technicians entering information in the field enrich the data’s context. A technician able to review their tasks, access the history of equipment, report time spent, log consumed parts, or report issues directly from their smartphone inherently improves the quality of the collected data.
The equipment park, the backbone of data
The collected data must be supported by a common structure, that of the equipment park. It begins with dividing the park into clear levels: site, workshop, line, machine, and then sub-assemblies.
Each piece of equipment is then assigned a unique identifier and categorized into a family (such as water, supply, packaging, building, cleaning, energy, or diesel group). This straightforward organization makes the equipment easy to locate and analyze.
This structure facilitates analysis, allowing for answers to questions that a simple list cannot address:
- Which equipment family causes the most stoppages?
- Which equipment are the most costly?
- What part of the factory has the majority of interventions?
- Which equipment are most critical?
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Excel: an accessible but limited tool
Many teams try to build this structure within Excel. While accessible, easy to use, and inexpensive, Excel files quickly accumulate and become challenging to keep updated. One file may be used for preventive plans, another for spare parts, and another for completed interventions. Intervention requests come via email or text, and dashboards are updated manually.
A CMMS changes this dynamic. The hierarchy of equipment and its levels allow for automatic consolidation of data by family or line, creating alerts, identifying trends, and calculating actual costs, which Excel alone cannot do.
From KPIs to decision-making
Once structured and centralized, this data can finally inform concrete decisions. Metrics like the failure rate, MTTR (Mean Time to Repair), MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), Pareto analysis, preventive maintenance rate, maintenance costs, and equipment availability help track activity over time.
These indicators primarily serve to identify equipment that requires special attention. If the same pump causes multiple failures within a short period, the history highlights the frequency of failures, associated costs, and downtime incurred. Equipment criticality approaches or Pareto analysis help prioritize efforts.
Preventive Maintenance at Durand Production
A well-constructed preventive plan also becomes a budget management tool. It allows for projecting hours, necessary resources, forecasted costs, and consumption of spare parts for any line in the equipment park.
For small teams starting this structuring, solutions like Corim XP Lite aim to simplify without complex infrastructure. The tool enables a 48% reduction in time spent searching for information and a 52% decrease in the number of breakdowns.
If you want to learn more, Corim solutions is hosting a webinar on this topic on October 1, 2026, titled “How to Move Beyond Fire-Fighting Maintenance?”.
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Jordan Park writes in-depth reviews and editorial opinion pieces for Touch Reviews. With a background in UI/UX design, Jordan offers a unique perspective on device usability and user experience across smartphones, tablets, and mobile software.