Blog > Automation > Optimize Your Maintenance with Fiix CMMS

Optimize Your Maintenance with Fiix CMMS

5/19/21  |  Anita O'Brien, Rexel Technical Consultant

Maintenance Without a CMMS

Work orders, inventory, reporting metrics, improve mean time to repair (MTTR), and improve overall equipment efficiency (OEE)—oh my!

Are you ever asked to do any of these tasks or accomplish these goals? Of course, you are. And these aren’t easy asks when you do not have the right tools to accomplish them all. Sometimes you need one person just to do reporting, another person to try to handle what you need for inventory, and then someone else to readjust that inventory for what you actually consumed on your work order. How do you manage those work orders? How do you track how long it takes to complete your work orders? How do you ensure your preventive work orders get completed when you are constantly working on reactive work orders, which just keeps backing up the preventive orders until it's just overwhelming, and you get further and further behind and start losing sight of what needs to be done?

Stop the madness! I have some encouraging news to share with you.

Introducing Fiix CMMS

Rockwell Automation® recently acquired a partner, Fiix. Fiix is a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) package. In simple terms, it is a way for companies to maximize the value of their production assets, systems, plants, and processes with cloud-based work order management, asset management, and parts/supplies management. Everyone performs work orders, whether preventive or reactive, and would certainly like to perform actions more predicatively to help reduce downtime and improve OEE. 

How do you track your work orders? How do you know what parts are associated with those work orders? How do you access the troubleshooting guides or the notes from a technician who is the expert at fixing that equipment? This is where Fiix comes in. Fiix allows for this work order creation, tracking, timing, and coordination with parts and allows you to upload troubleshooting guides, pictures, videos, notes, etc. And in the process, the CMMS manages your assets and provides you with everything you need to track MTTR and increase OEE.

Fiix CMMS to the Rescue

Recently, I received a call from a municipal customer who handles multiple locations with a small team of technicians. The current work order tracking method was a Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet, which he found increasingly frustrating and ineffective. Coordinating work orders was becoming a difficult task, and he was never guaranteed that the parts were in stock when he needed them. It seemed like he had to rush things in regularly. 

As I listened to his issues, the answer was clear—he needed a CMMS. We worked together to find out some of his fundamental needs, and I coordinated a call with the experts at Fiix. The next day, we spent a little over an hour showing the customer the tool and answering all his questions. We demonstrated a simple solution that would cover all his maintenance planning and work order execution. He loved that the app could work offline for his team. He was also impressed that Fiix CMMS is a fraction of the cost and uplift he was expecting from other maintenance solutions that were not designed for the vertical assets his team manages. The other key feature for his team was the work request portal. It simplifies the data he needs from the other supervisors and automatically updates them on the status of that work order. He can also plan his work orders and ensure he always has the inventory he needs, and he can track the consumed inventory.