When your Healthcare Technology Management (HTM) department chooses to use a CMMS to manage assets, complete work orders, and track materials, you’re making a big investment – financially and in labor time. Ideally, the CMMS you choose helps you offset the cost of the product by improved management features that help save time and money.
FSI’s Custom Maintenance Software, or CMS, does more than just help healthcare systems manage assets and work orders – it creates systems and processes that ultimately improve efficiency and effectiveness enough to provide a significant return on investment (ROI).
How does CMS help HTM save time and money? By delivering on the six key functionalities a CMMS needs to give you a return on investment. Learn what these six key functionalities are and how your team could reap the benefits.
One of the greatest frustrations for HTM departments is inaccurate asset data. FSI can perform a complete data collection and/or verification of asset data so technicians can spend their valuable time and resources elsewhere.
The asset standardization that CMS offers, including manufacturer, model, asset categories, and more, can help technicians populate the asset record more than twice as fast as entering all fields manually. With a minimum of 60%-time savings, a technicians could enter 100 assets in two hours, versus the five hours it would normally take.
Standardization and mass editing, or the ability to change multiple records in just one step, are enormous time savers. The more records you update, the greater the time savings you will achieve.
It’s essential that any CMMS allow technicians to manage work orders that need to be completed, but the right system also makes it possible to boost efficiency in this area.
CMS allows you to easily locate the most important information about an asset all in one place, including whether the asset is assigned to a contract and the asset’s full work order history, so your technicians doesn’t have to go digging in multiple places for critical items. Most importantly, all of this can be performed on a mobile device at the point of service increasing technician efficiency and productivity.
CMS Procedures and schedules offer HTM significant flexibility to meet the needs of individual operations. Procedures can be based on instructions a technician follows or a set of checklists the technician confirms have been completed. Schedules are setup to automatically generate PM work orders to ensure the right assets have PM work orders created at the right time.
Keeping up with preventative maintenance, or PMs, is a core functionality of a CMMS. For HTM teams who frequently find themselves frustrated and wasting time trying to uncover which PMs have been completed and which are still due, CMS can be an important tool to ensure regulatory compliance. In CMS, PM work orders can be automatically assigned by the scheduling system to each individual technician, team of technicians, or vendor, saving your staff from taking their time to manually assign PMs.
In an effort to boost visibility and effectiveness, Dashboard reports and charts allow everyone on the team to use one click to see what’s been assigned, what is still due, what has been completed, saving everyone significant time from having to run one or more reports each time.
One aspect of your CMMS that should not be overlooked, especially as it pertains to saving money, is materials management. By tracking stock levels, warehouses, and materials vendors, you never need to worry about where a material is located, where to order more, or whether you have enough of a certain item when needed. This prevents you from potentially buying more of something you don’t need and saves you the effort of having to track down important location information.
Materials management also comes into play for work orders. By auto assigning materials items to PM work orders, your technicians don’t have to take the time to do that themselves. Consider how long it would take to attach batteries to 1,000 infusion pumps and you realize how valuable auto assigning materials can be for your return on investment.
Contracts are important for many reasons, but when you consider time and money, one of the key things to consider relates to knowing which assets require the manufacturer or a vendor to perform maintenance.
Having CMS track contracts keeps technicians from taking the time and using materials to service assets that they shouldn’t with notifications to the technician at the work order. From the contract record, view all assets covered, and from the asset record, directly access the contract record. By keeping your team organized and fully managing your contracts and associated assets, CMS really pays off.
The ability to run accurate reports is critical for both operations and compliance. Without accurate asset data, reporting can be a huge issue and demand time to correct inconsistencies. In addition to the standardization of asset data the CMS provides, running reports on current ownership of all assets can help eliminate duplicate manufacturer records with the same models.
Simply run one report to see how many of a certain model you have and learn the cost of maintaining them. This keeps you from having to run two different reports, combining them, and then recalculating the data. Having accurate information makes reporting much more efficient.
Regulatory reporting is also very important to HTM. Linking the regulatory standard to the work order and subsequent reporting ensures HTM is meeting these requirements and maintaining compliance.
Your CMMS is such an important tool that you want to make sure it’s making every aspect of your job easier while saving you time and money. There’s nothing better than the security and confidence of knowing that you have access to the six key functionalities to deliver a return on your investment with CMS.
Ready to take the next steps in achieving more ROI with your CMMS? Contact a member of our team.