How Can a CMMS Help Deal with the Labor Shortage?

Although we have moved on from many COVID-19 pandemic-era restrictions, the manufacturing industry continues to deal with the shockwaves. For one, manufacturers continue to face supply chain challenges. Perhaps even more significantly, the labor shortage isn’t easing up.

In the latest Manufacturers’ Outlook Survey (Second Quarter 2023), 74.7% of manufacturing leaders in the US report “attracting and retaining a quality workforce” as a top challenge. It doesn’t stop there. Numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor & Statistics reveal that despite unemployment being at record low levels, around 750,000 manufacturing jobs remain unfilled, a number Deloitte predicts to grow to 2.1 million in the U.S. alone by 2030.

Estimates suggest Canada’s manufacturing industry alone has lost $13 billion due to the shortages, with about 62 percent of manufacturers losing deals, turning down contracts, and facing production delays due to labor shortfalls.

The good news is that this isn’t entirely due to the pandemic, so creative solutions can help mitigate some of these problems. McKinsey cites workers’ morale, productivity, and safety as contributing factors to the labor shortage. Let’s look at ways you can mitigate these problems today.

Mitigating Labor Shortage with a CMMS

Improve Your Safety Procedures

Maintaining a safe work environment is one of the most fundamental regulatory requirements for any facility in any industry. The health and safety of your workers should always be your #1 priority.

Despite this, as we’ve stated, many workers cite workplace safety as a reason for their unwillingness to take up manufacturing jobs. If you’re looking to hire top talent and increase employee retention, you’ll need to address this problem and reassure your prospective (and present) staff that their safety is a priority.

One way to do this is using CMMS software to automate your safety protocols. Instead of pen-and-paper safety compliance processes, use a CMMS to create safety work orders in advance and ensure that staff members adhere to them.

Doing this goes beyond staying in regulatory compliance. It also helps maintenance teams feel more secure as they have access to any safety information they need through your CMMS provider on their smartphones.

Some CMMS even go a step further. MaintainX houses a global procedure library containing pre-formatted safety procedures for various industries.

Manage Your Workforce Better

Staff often complain about low morale when they feel they are not adequately utilizing their skill sets. Using a CMMS system to manage preventive maintenance can help your staff focus on what’s important.

Automating preventive maintenance scheduling can reduce downtime and prevent breakdowns, ensuring your skilled workers spend less time on easily avoidable reactive maintenance. Maintenance workers will have a clearer sense of what to do and a more stable and structured approach to time management, as they will have fewer emergency maintenance tasks around breakdowns.

In addition, because a good CMMS solution will allow you to schedule and repeat asset maintenance tasks in advance, you can better manage your workers’ time. You can approve work requests, track work orders, avoid overbooking individual technicians, and make sure that everyone works at a reasonable pace.

You can also track staff metrics and KPIs to understand their individual performance and offer support where necessary.

Streamline Processes for Staff

Best facility management practices require that everyone follows the proper procedures and processes throughout the workplace. Putting this into practice can be challenging for team members who often work across multiple areas and departments.

Remembering maintenance schedules and every last detail of processes and procedures for maintenance processes alone is easier said than done. Not to mention safety, inventory management, and others.

A cloud-based CMMS can simplify this for your maintenance department by allowing you to create and store standard operating procedures for your various processes. MaintainX, for example, also offers cloud-based storage and access to documents, which your staff can access from wherever they are through the CMMS software solution.

Maintenance technicians will know precisely how to approach the maintenance work they are responsible for.

Preserve Institutional Knowledge

What happens when you do find maintenance staff to replace the ones that have retired or quit? The obvious answer is training them. But, depending on your facility, there could be a lot of tribal knowledge that rests with staff members. Every facility will develop unique ways of doing things: the oil that works best for a particular asset, the best brand of fan belts to buy.

A lot of this knowledge develops from working on the frontlines, and the knowledge can be lost with the frontline workers if they leave. A CMMS can help you maintain a record of this kind of tribal knowledge.

By establishing a robust maintenance history, you can ensure the little details are there when you have new staff. This approach will also help optimize your maintenance strategies moving forward.

In addition to tribal knowledge and implementing a CMMS, creating a staffing culture that is rewarded for attending professional webinars and seeking maintenance certifications goes a long way.

MaintainX CMMS and the Workforce

MaintainX is a computerized maintenance management software that seeks to optimize your preventive maintenance activities and help you reduce breakdowns and equipment downtime.

Preventive maintenance is critical to improving uptime, reducing maintenance costs, and helping improve profitability. While pen-and-paper and Excel spreadsheets work fine, MaintainX offers a user-friendly web-based and mobile CMMS platform to help you streamline maintenance operations and overall workflows.

If you want to create a successful maintenance program, take advantage of MaintainX’s CMMS features, such as

• A desktop and mobile app offering real-time updates from the shop floor
• Reporting dashboards for actionable insights
• Standard Operating Procedures, and a Global Procedures Library to improve your maintenance, safety, and operations, and help stay in regulatory compliance.
• Instant notifications via your mobile device
• Enterprise asset management (EAM) functionality
• Work order management
• A parts inventory module to help manage and track spare parts
• Checklists and templates
• Asset tracking/asset lifecycle tracking
• Asset performance monitoring for predictive maintenance
• Barcodes and QR codes

And much more! Ranked highest for ease of use on Capterra for 2022 and currently rated #1 for “most implementable” and “easiest setup” in G2’s spring 2023 report, MaintainX solves all your maintenance needs.