How to manage equipment disposal with a CMMS

As the saying goes, all goes things must come to an end, and this includes assets. No matter how good your asset management strategy is, every piece of equipment will eventually reach the end of its useful life and need to be sold, recycled, or disposed of.

But equipment disposal has become a challenge due to the complexity of modern systems as well as stricter environmental policies. Physical hazards, dangerous chemicals, and sensitive data can all make the equipment retirement process difficult.

Luckily, you’ve got a CMMS. Not only does the software help maintain assets during their useful life, it also makes disposal way easier.

A CMMS helps maintain an accurate record of each asset throughout its life, and can be used to record all steps in the disposal process to make sure it’s carried out safely and according to company policy.

Tracking equipment disposal: Step-by-step

The easiest way to handle equipment disposal is through the project feature in the CMMS application. Remember, if a job is too big to be tracked in a work order, you should create a project instead.

Step 1 – Create a project for the equipment disposal.

Step 2 – Create a disposal task group for each major job in the asset disposal process. The example below is the standard lockout tagout procedure. That way, we can reuse the same task groups for all future asset disposals at the facility. Furthermore, if in the future the legislation changes, you only need to return to the task group to make the change to all of your disposal work orders or scheduled maintenances.

Step 3 – Add work orders for each step in the disposal process.

Step 4 – Upload MSDS sheets and equipment disposal forms to the “files” section of the project or into the corresponding work orders for that task.

Step 5 – Change the status of the asset to “disposed” once the item has permanently left the facility.

Creating scheduled disposals in advance

It is possible to plan equipment disposal in advance. To do this, create a project for the equipment disposal as outlined above but instead of creating work orders, create scheduled maintenance for each step in the process. Each scheduled maintenance trigger could be set to a disposal event for the asset. In the example below, the trigger is the “hazardous disposal” event.

When the asset is set offline, and the equipment disposal event is triggered for the asset, the disposal work orders will be issued from the list of scheduled maintenance in the project.

Proactively managing the equipment disposal is crucial to satisfy regulatory requirements and reduce safety related risks, but it can also have financial benefits if the asset can be sold on or stripped for spare parts.

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