Coding and Organization for CMMS

Developing a standard coding set for tracking event types within your CMMS is, next to developing an accurate implementation plan, the most important step of implementing your project. There is so much work in developing a flexible yet functional code set that this one element becomes a closely guarded part of a company's intellectual property. Ideally, some organization like WEF (or maybe PNCWA AM Committee ????) would take on developing an open source standard for the wastewater industry, but to date I am not aware of one.



The next best option is to adopt a code set from a similar industry and apply it where possible to water and wastewater. Fortunately, there is an ISO standard used in the Oil and Gas industry that certainly comes close to having similar equipment, ISO 14224. ISO is very proud of their work, and they should be. However, the approximately $230 required to purchase their standard is a bit steep for most of us.



So, I would like to recommend an excellent article from Plant Engineering, August 2004 by Ken Latino, titled "Understanding event data collection: Part 2" . In this article, Mr. Latino does an excellent job of walking through the Work Order (WO) workflow which I would recommend you consider adopting for your process.

He carefully documents what data should be recorded at each step of the workflow. Please pay special attention to Step 3, where he recommends a list of information that should be recorded when a WO is closed (Location ID, Equipment ID, Malfunction start date, Failure finding codes, Event type, Malfunction end date, Maintainable item, Damage codes, Primary cause, and Primary activity). The final portion of the article is a description of the main ISO 14224 codes and some description of where they might be used. Read the entire article here



To implement the code set in your CMMS, you will need to designate several User Defined Fields (UDF)s to hold the codes you plan to use. Since the UDF's are configurable, you will want to designate what field will be used for in your data field map definition and then pre-populate where appropriate, for example the equipment types (you might catch me referring to them as Asset Type Codes in future emails).