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Tag: Maintenance

  • How Does a Preventive Maintenance Software Help Your Company?

    While many organizations consider their maintenance department to be a cost centre, implementing a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) with preventive maintenance functionality allows for disciplined planning and scheduling practices. In time, this move can shift the maintenance department from a cost centre to a profit centre. If you want your equipments to function properly till the end, you need to maintain them and take care of them.

    To avoid any equipment from malfunctioning and to predict the future timing of maintenance work, businesses have started installing preventive maintenance or predictive maintenance software. Not only does this bolster a conducive working environment, but it also lessens the workload on the staff. This being said, preventive maintenance software helps in improving productivity, facilitates growth in revenue, and moreover, plays a key role in the trimming of budget expenses.

    GIn this article, we will talk about how Preventive Maintenance Software helps in improving the company’s efficiency. So, let’s get started.

    Proper Management of Work Orders
    Creating Detailed and Digestible Reports
    Scheduling Routine Maintenance Work
    Monitoring Inventory and Asset Management
    Compliance With Safety and Regulatory Standards
    Improvement in Productivity
    Popular Preventive Maintenance Software Systems

    Proper Management of Work Orders

    Various tools present in any industry-grade preventive maintenance software help the facility managers in scheduling the order of maintenance work of assets, and as a result, help them record and track the completion of various tasks quickly.

    Furthermore, this software setup helps the heads of a company to keep track of the history of maintenance activities along with helping them in assigning tasks to respective employees. They also provide templates for work orders so that the designers and engineers can curate work orders to efficiently communicate information about tasks to other workers.

    Eventually, this upgrade in the workflow breeds improved communication and efficient internal management of workers. Nowadays, almost any preventive maintenance software provides role or tittle-based authorization, because of which only authorized personnel can mark a task as complete.

    Creating Detailed and Digestible Reports

    Businesses require reports of maintenance activities, which provide them with knowledge of the timing of these activities, how well they have been executed, and their corresponding completion time. Preventive maintenance comes forth with various styles in which a user can create detailed reports that are digestible and easily understandable. This will help in boosting productivity and the impact of preventive maintenance work being carried out to avoid any failure or breakdown.

    Concerned managers can also input some key details in it, such as warranty details and information related to purchase. This particular feature of preventive maintenance software enables companies to assess the maintenance of equipment against its warranty. If a piece of equipment is under warranty period, the engineers and maintenance staff are notified right away. This is pivotal in the proper tackling of real-time maintenance procedures.

    Scheduling Routine Maintenance Work

    Equipment and machinery often come with information about periodic intervals after which they are required to be serviced. This is to be done on a routine basis and includes indispensable tasks like the replacement of parts, repair work, inspections, oiling, and more.

    By keeping track of all these activities, a preventive maintenance system brings transparency to the maintenance workflow. This ensures that all the above tasks are executed within the given timeline in order to keep the equipment or assets well maintained and at par with industry standards.

    The users can also input commands in preventive maintenance software to automatically schedule maintenance at marked intervals. The maintenance software is also designed to rank maintenance schedules as per an arbitrary or predefined priority or protocol for maintenance. This reduces the possibility of human error and boosts consistency.

    Monitoring Inventory and Asset Management

    Inventory is often maintained just above the minimum required level in order to keep costs at the lowest. The new-age preventive maintenance system provides you with data and analysis of the current condition of machinery and its maintenance cycle. Such updates tell the managers about how often the consumables and other inputs are being used. Eventually, this saves the business from unexpected wastage of stocks and proper management.

    Various maintenance software offer features that involve continuous monitoring of asset performance – a utility that allows the user to treat them via the apt methodology. Another useful feature that such software provides is tracking the rate of depreciation of individual assets, which can be complex if quantified manually.

    Compliance With Safety and Regulatory Standards

    Preventive maintenance software not only helps you with asset management but also in complying with safety standards and regulations, thereby keeping your facility safe for your employees to work in. It does this by keeping track of the location of all the heavy and sensitive equipment to ensure a safe layout of your facility and thus, reducing the chances of damages or accidents.

    Also, it records the maintenance of such apparatus equipment for auditing so that if any equipment or machine fails, you will not have to go through a large pile of files to get proof of regular maintenance records. It is also beneficial for the employees, as it constantly tracks health and safety-related data. Furthermore, it reduces the amount of paperwork required for all daily conducted activities.

    Different companies use different preventive maintenance software, some of the most popular ones that are used and help in keeping the infrastructure up to date are:

    • Limble CMMS
    • MaintainX
    • Upkeep
    • Asset Panda
    • Mapcon
    • Fiix
    • eMaint

    Conclusion

    The features and tools offered by the preventive maintenance system enable the companies to be able to compete well against other players in the industry by assisting them in keeping their infrastructure up to date and well maintained. Preventive maintenance software help businesses to minimize mechanical failures or downtime, enhance efficiency, and improve the lifespan of the equipment. With these software programs, one is able to understand situational needs and can identify the crucial assets that are key in the daily working of the business.

    FAQs

    What is Preventive Maintenance Software?

    Preventive maintenance software is software that deals with productivity but also help maintain it in the future through its predictive ability to forecast future maintenance needs.

    What are the top Preventive Maintenance Software?

    • Limble CMMS
    • MaintainX
    • Upkeep
    • Asset Panda
    • Mapcon
    • Fiix
    • eMaint

    What are the 4 types of Preventive Maintenance?

    • Periodic Maintenance
    • Meter-Based Maintenance
    • Predictive Maintenance
    • Prescriptive Maintenance

  • Ecommerce vs Retail | What Is the Best Option for Your Business?

    We often come across the question of whether e-commerce or retail is best for a business. E-commerce is a replica of business that enables individuals and companies to sell their services or products via the internet. On the other hand, retail refers to the brick and mortar businesses, in which individuals sell their goods or services from person to person in shops, malls, and localities.

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    According to Statista 2021, total retail sales, both online and offline, amounted to 24.2 trillion USD, out of which 19.1 trillion USD was generated by the brick and mortar retail channel and around 4.9 trillion USD was generated by the eCommerce sales channel. In the same year, global retail sales accounted for a growth of 9.7% as a whole and eCommerce accounted for around 19.6% of total retail sales.

    The digital form of business has seen a great increment specifically in this pandemic. But at the same time, the heavy revenue generated from retail cannot be ignored. In this article, we will discuss different factors that will help you know what is best for your business between eCommerce and retail.

    Ecommerce vs Retail, What’s Better?

    Ecommerce vs Retail, What’s Better?

    Retail Ecommerce Sales Worldwide from 2017 to 2022
    Retail Ecommerce Sales Worldwide from 2017 to 2022

    In the following points, we will discuss a comparison between eCommerce and retail from different perspectives:

    Which Has Lesser Prior Investment?

    Ecommerce
    Starting an eCommerce business may sound like an expensive process but with proper planning and execution, one can start running it on a budget. The investment required to start your eCommerce business in India is nearly 5-10 lakh rupees. It includes building your business website, hosting, domain, sales and management tools, web development, and advertisements.

    Retail
    Investment in setting up a retail store can be an expensive process. A retail store has to invest in various things before selling its product. These include building, buying, or renting a store, paying license fees, hiring staff for multiple positions, paying location tax, investing in filling up the store with sufficient items to attract a customer, and other necessary resources relating to business and government. All such expenses make setting up a retail store far more expensive than starting an eCommerce store.

    So, comparatively, the cost of investment is lower in the case of eCommerce than in retail. The advantage of owning an eCommerce store is that it reduces the cost of setting up a brick-and-mortar store or hiring delivery staff. This is because eCommerce stores send their manufactured products to branches such as Amazon, FedEx, Ship Bob, Flipkart, etc. for order fulfilment. After this, it is the responsibility of these branches to pack, track and send the order to the buyer.

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    Which is Easier to Maintain?

    Ecommerce
    It is easier to maintain eCommerce compared to a retail store. But there are still some complications that need to be checked from time to time so that the store can run smoothly. For example- you need to maintain a warehouse or any proper space to keep the products safe and accessible for dropshipping. Since you are not directly connected with your customers, you will have to keep a check on analytics to track customer experience and discover their new tastes and likings. You will also need to keep a check on the timing of product delivery to avoid negative feedback from customers.

    Retail
    The retail business is considered to be a bit more complicated in terms of maintenance. This is because for various reasons like there is a need to maintain a proper brick-and-mortar store and inventory, and maintenance of an adequate communication balance on both sides in real-time with suppliers and customers. Also, you have to keep a regular check on your staff if they are handling the customers politely. You will have to train them and make them more knowledgeable about the services and products you are offering so that they can deal with the customers pleasantly and accurately.

    It is easier to modernize the stock in an eCommerce store. But this task becomes pretty difficult with retail stores as for updating products, you need to set up meetings with suppliers now and then. So, in case of ease of maintenance, eCommerce is a better option for your business.

    Share of consumers going to brick and mortar stores by country in 2021
    Share of consumers going to brick and mortar stores by country in 2021

    Which Has Better Profitability in Future?

    Ecommerce
    With eCommerce comes a great benefit which is unlimited access to customers. Once you are over the internet, there is no limit to the number of people you can reach. Ecommerce allows you to showcase your products and services to a large number of people, therefore, no limitation to any particular locality. Moreover, you can always expand your business and attract new customers via smart and modern marketing techniques. These include offering free shipping, discounts, gift cards, reward points, etc. All this ultimately ensures better sales and thus, better profits.

    Retail
    Retail stores do not have very wide access to the customers as they have limitations due to their fixed location. However, this does not mean that there are no benefits of a retail store. Even in today’s time, many customers do not feel satisfied until they can touch and feel the products themselves. So, the customers who are still skeptical about online shopping contributes to the sales and profits of retail stores. Moreover, there are fewer chances of online fraud with retail shops, as the customer doesn’t need to provide their personal information including emails, mobile numbers, bank details, etc.

    In this case, eCommerce will be the clear winner because the products and services of eCommerce stores are visible to a huge audience which makes for a large potential customer base and thus, better sales and profits.

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    Conclusion

    We compared e-commerce and retail stores based on investment, performance easiness, and profits obtained. Although there are factors like trusted quality and physical interaction that make retail stores better than eCommerce ones. But after making an overall comparison and looking at the future of the digital world, we concluded that eCommerce stores are the best way to expand your business and earn more profit in the future since it offers a wider reach with less investment.

    However, you can also take another way which is you can opt for omnichannel retail as it allows you to buy products either online or physically through the real stores to keep your customers satisfied in all the possible ways.

    FAQs

    What is the difference between eCommerce and retail?

    Retail is something that can be conducted in a brick-and-mortar store, online, between persons, or through direct mail. However, eCommerce refers to electronic commerce which means commercial transactions that are conducted only through the internet.

    How owning an online store is better than physical stores?

    Owners of the online stores can sell and ship their products and services to a large number of people with fewer investments as buying a website is easier and more economical than buying a physical store.

    What is the biggest challenge faced by eCommerce?

    One of the most significant challenges faced by eCommerce is the security issue. Ecommerce involves a great deal of personal information and even a small technical issue can create huge damage to a business’s operations and image.

    What is a retail store?

    The most common example of a retail store is the conventional brick-and-mortar stores like Walmart, Best Buy, etc. However, retailing as a whole includes goods or services sold through stores, kiosks, or even on the internet.