Communicating the value of a CMMS is something our guest experts tackle countless times and from various perspectives throughout their careers. Customers who seek out a CMMS have the exact same experiences in that the perspectives are that of maintenance and leadership; in a way, we speak different languages. There's even more to this when we consider the overall industry, company type, and organizational culture. Obviously, it's nuanced but there are some general concepts that may help get you on the right path toward communicating the value of your/a CMMS.
Basic fundamentals – just like maintenance and reliability – play a crucial role in how you communicate value across teams.
Let’s Agree on the Scenario
I've taken a very general and anecdotal approach to this article as a starting point for this ongoing topic. Let's agree that our scenario, for this article, is building support for finding and implementing a CMMS platform in your organization. We'll need a few assumptions (yes, we all know those are not great LOL), like we have completed an analysis of our maintenance processes, discovered a set of problems, and that a CMMS is the best solution for that problem. Notice that communicating the value already started if you've gotten this far; however, is it the right value.
First, Let’s Consider What the Front Lines Need
Maintenance cares about how they're moving through their daily world and simply wants to do great work – the less disruption to their process, the better, which means they must be empowered and somewhat autonomous in their day-to-day. That requires trust and communication is a BIG part of trust in both our teammates, our leadership, and within oneself. To build trust through communication we need to be direct, yet mindful, about the why and the impacts with transparency. A risky concept.
Leadership Must Be Engaged
Communicating the Value
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Define the problem you have with plenty of support – qualitative and quantitative!
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Educate leadership on where this shows in your day-to-day and theirs (the impacts)!
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Leadership must do the same and convert the money, metrics, and KPIs to meaningful impact for the maintenance team!
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We need internal champions and stakeholder representation from all parts (not sides)!
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Slow down and do this right – Haste makes waste and this stage is about the foundation upon which you build your CMMS (and reliability) program.
My Passion for the Basic Fundamentals
Basic fundamentals – just like maintenance and reliability – play a crucial role in how you communicate value across teams and how we can blend the perspectives of both leadership and maintenance operations is why we are doing what we are doing! We need to dig deeper into this and it's a common topic on CMMSradio - It tends to come up in each episode. Tune in to get all of those insights from our amazing guests!!