A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) helps you effectively manage all maintenance activities, including maintenance budgeting. It covers expenses like labor, parts, and miscellaneous costs for work orders, equipment replacement, and tracking special projects.
Budget Forecasting
Running a maintenance department without a solid budget plan is challenging. Decisions often rely on guesswork or emergencies, lacking data on past maintenance and future needs. Include costs for planned, corrective, and emergency maintenance in your budget. Preventive maintenance costs are easy to forecast since they are scheduled activities. Use your CMMS to schedule assets for planned maintenance and estimate future costs for maintenance budgeting. While unplanned maintenance is unpredictable, your CMMS can provide data on asset history and average costs, helping to minimize surprises.
Budget Tracking
Track your maintenance budget by month, accounting period, or fiscal year with CMMS software. Your organization’s Accounting Department assigns budget account numbers, and it’s crucial to monitor these closely. A CMMS helps you apply costs—whether for capital expenditures, parts, or labor—directly to the correct budget account. This tracking ensures you quickly identify when you’re exceeding budget limits.
A CMMS can help in the following ways:
- Apply purchases made for any capital expenditures or special project to the appropriate budget account
- Apply purchases made for any parts and supplies to the appropriate budget account
- Apply the costs of the work being performed to a budget account including labor, parts, supplies and miscellaneous costs.
Maintenance Budgeting Analysis
Analyzing maintenance budgeting data impacts your company’s bottom line. Maintenance is a significant expenditure, but with the right processes and a fully-implemented CMMS, you can control costs. A budget analysis generated by your CMMS helps you:
- Assess the accuracy of your forecasted budget and adjust for the future.
- Decide whether to increase or decrease the maintenance budget based on data.
- Reallocate budget funds if necessary.
- Drill down into data for specific assets, comparing repair costs to the budget forecast.
Importance of Data in Maintenance Budgeting
A fully-implemented CMMS collects vast amounts of data, crucial for both historical and real-time analysis. Maintenance management needs this data to justify budget increases to upper management. Reports and graphs generated by your CMMS serve as powerful tools for making your case. These reports also help identify problems within the maintenance department and track improvements over time.
Real-time dashboards in your CMMS allow quick and easy generation of visual reports. These tools help maintenance staff, management, and upper management keep a close eye on maintenance activities.
Relying on the Right CMMS
Since 1986, DPSI has been a global leader in CMMS and EAM solutions. We provide the features and functions necessary to manage your maintenance budgeting effectively. Beyond software, we offer project planning, implementation assistance, training, customer support, and continuous software enhancement. Interested in seeing how DPSI’s maintenance management software can streamline your maintenance budgeting? Contact us today for a free trial!
