11.20.06
Posted in Software Reviews, Solution at 3:05 pm by Admin
If you have fiddle around at at least access any maintenance or facility management software, you will notice that it takes a while for you to familiarize yourself before you get the hang of it. Let us say that you never done facility management job before and suddenly, your management suddenly decided to relocate you to a maintenance division and you are required to handle the management of it. You are then given a set of software to run and do your work and you are just given a short training before you get comfortable with it. What do you do? Here’s some tip to overcome this problem:
Tip Number 1
When you get to your office, before you do anything, stare at the main dashboard for at least 5 minutes. This is for you to digest what button and features the software has. If that went well, don’t be afraid to click around. Just don’t click on the ‘delete’ though.
Tip Number 2
Be familiar with the jargons of the software. If you don’t understand any of the terms, go to help and look up on the glossary. Don’t spend too much time on the help because it will eat up a lot of time, only refer to help as a reference point and not your tutorial. If you have no idea on what you are dealing with, you can always go online, search on Google or Wikipedia for some explanation.
Tip Number 3
Search for tips and tricks or do some small experiment using the software to find shortcuts so that you can save up time. The purpose of having software is to save time, it is almost the same as having a calculator, you save time by not having to struggle counting using your head.
Bottomline, if you focus, spend time and do your work properly, you’ll get the hang of these maintenance management softwares.
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09.04.06
Posted in Software Reviews at 3:32 pm by Admin
If you’ve visited to this blog before or even now, you’ll noticed that there are advertisements about free CMMS softwares and other stuff about facility management. We recently took a peek of one of them. We are really happy to know that it has been developed by a local Malaysian company. The name of the software is CWorks. Of course we are not as big as them as they are quite well established and they have a list of reputable clients. Maybe we could try and work with them some way in the future.
CMMS stands for Computerized Maintenance Management Software. Basically it is a software used to aid the process of maintenance for a building or organizations. So, instead of having it all on paper, you can now use a piece of software to process all the required work. Taking a typewriter as an example, a typewriter is noisy, time consuming and it cannot be corrected once you make a mistake. Nowadays, people use computers to type, store, print and retrieve any information in a click of a mouse. That saves up valuable precious time in today’s hectic schedule.
Taking it up another level, a popular way to collate data is by using spreadsheets. Here’s some issues concerning using spreadsheets:
- It’s easy to use (advantage)
- Easy to manipulate and configure at the beginning (advantage)
- Hard to search when the data is really big (disadvantage)
- Large amount of data can be corrupted easily when duplications occur (disadvantage)
So, how do you overcome the disadvantage concerning large amount of data? You need to build a database. What kind of database you may ask. For a start, you can use this piece of software:
CWorks CMMS uses Microsoft Access database in the background. Microsoft Access is a basic database management software sufficient to handle large data in a small scale.
CWorks CMMS simplifies maintenance work by putting all the data in organized database and retrieves the data in a click of a mouse. Best of all, you can try it for free first before you even buy it. The only software you need before downloading this software is Microsoft Access (the latest 2003 version is recommended).
You can also check out their product comparison page to see what other features they have. With so many features, the only missing thing for you to do is to build up the real usable database. Now that involves a lot of man hours and requires excrutiating process of data collection and collating mainly for facility managers. That is another subject to cover which involves Project Management but for now, we should start somewhere. This software is excellent for small scale or even expanding to big organizations who needs a simple ready to use software to manage their maintenance process but lack in numbers of personnel. For bigger needs, there is always other solutions (we recommend ARCHIBUS/FM) which we will discuss later on.
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