CMMS and "Bridge Features"

Introduction

Every Computerized Maintenance Management System, or CMMS, comes packed with features promising to save you time, money, and heartache. Cloud computing-back mobile means you can generate, delegate, and track work orders from anywhere, at any time. Inventory management means no more rush deliveries or high carrying costs. And preventive maintenance scheduling means no more calls late Friday afternoon when an asset suddenly fails. But how can you make sure you get a CMMS that effectively delivers on all of these promises?

Before looking at how to shop for a CMMS, it's important to understand how a lot of people currently go about it.

Shopping by Pain Points

It's no accident that providers refer to CMMS platforms as “solutions.” Maintenance departments routinely come to providers with a list of the problems they're facing, and providers make their best attempts to explain how their product can help solve them.

Common Maintenance pain points include:

• Complete lack of or a poorly functioning Preventative Maintenance (PM) program
• Uneven oversight leading to low accountability
• Siloed data making it impossible to see the big picture
• Constant worry about the loss of institutional knowledge

When properly implemented, today’s CMMS platforms can help departments:

• Schedule PMs and track program compliance
• Track work order close-out rates and resource productivity
• Leverage data with autogenerated, KPI-rich reports
• Standardize work order instructions and maintain asset work order histories

If you’ve researched CMMSs in the past or you're currently looking, a lot of these will look familiar. And the idea of using a shopping list of problems to evaluate different CMMS platforms should also look familiar. There's a good reason for that.