Do You Actually Need a CMMS?

A CMMS can give a maintenance team one place to manage work orders, preventive maintenance, equipment history, parts, labor and other maintenance information.

That does not mean every maintenance operation needs one.

A small team with straightforward equipment and a well-run spreadsheet may have no reason to replace what already works. A larger or more complicated operation may reach a point where keeping track of the work becomes difficult with spreadsheets, email, paper, calendars and conversations.

There is no universal number of assets, technicians or work orders that marks that point.

A better place to start is your maintenance operation.

Can you reliably see the work that needs to be done, decide what comes first, plan and assign it, complete it, record what happened and find that information later?

Those are some of the basic functions of maintenance management. NIST describes a maintenance-management workflow that includes selecting and prioritizing work, planning it, scheduling it, executing it, completing it and using the resulting information for analysis.[1]

Where that process is becoming difficult, you have something specific to investigate.

Start with the maintenance operation you have now

Before looking at software, follow a maintenance job through your current process.

Suppose someone notices a problem with a piece of equipment.

How is the problem reported?

Who sees it?

Who decides how urgent it is?

How does it become work for a technician?

Where does the technician find the information needed to do the job?

How are parts and other resources handled?

What gets recorded when the work is finished?

Where does that record go?

Could someone find it six months from now?

Do the same exercise with preventive maintenance.

How do you know what is due next week?

How does it get assigned?

How do you know whether it was completed?

What happens to the findings?

You may discover that the current process works quite well.

You may also discover that several people are maintaining their own pieces of it.

That is useful information before you spend any time evaluating CMMS products.

Signs your current process may be reaching its limit

The following are not automatic reasons to buy software. They are places to look more closely at how maintenance is being managed.

You can't easily see all the work that needs attention

Maintenance work can come from many places.

An operator reports a problem. A technician notices something during an inspection. Preventive maintenance becomes due. A supervisor identifies work that can wait until a planned shutdown.

NIST notes that maintenance work may be identified by operators, maintainers, engineers, analysts, events and scheduled maintenance strategies. That work then has to be reviewed and prioritized alongside existing backlog and scheduled preventive maintenance.[1]

Ask a simple question:

Can someone responsible for maintenance see the work that currently needs attention?

If the answer requires checking email, paper forms, text messages, spreadsheets, calendars and people's memories, the problem is worth examining.

The issue is not the number of tools by itself. The issue is whether the team can reliably see and manage the work.

Priorities and ownership are becoming difficult to track

Maintenance teams rarely have unlimited time and resources.

NIST's maintenance-management research notes that there is generally more work to do than can be completed in a single planning and scheduling period, which makes prioritization necessary.[1]

For each job, can you tell:

• how important it is;
• whether it has been reviewed;
• whether it has been planned;
• who is responsible for it;
• when it is expected to happen;
• whether anything is preventing the work from proceeding?

A whiteboard or spreadsheet may handle this perfectly well for a simple operation.

As the number of jobs, people, assets, shifts or locations grows, maintaining that picture can become harder.

Preventive maintenance is difficult to coordinate

Preventive maintenance creates recurring work.

Someone needs to know what is due, on which equipment, what the job requires and whether it was completed.

Look at the way your team manages that today.

Can you see upcoming preventive maintenance without rebuilding the schedule manually?

Can technicians see what needs to be done?

Can you tell what is overdue?

Can you confirm that completed work was actually recorded?

If managing the schedule itself has become a significant administrative task, a CMMS may be worth investigating.

Equipment history is scattered or difficult to find

A completed maintenance job can become useful information about an asset.

NIST researchers have described historical maintenance work orders as containing much of the available knowledge about a maintenance workflow. Those records can preserve information about symptoms, causes, work performed and other details of previous maintenance activity.[2]

Consider a machine that develops a familiar problem.

Can the technician or supervisor quickly find what happened last time?

Can they see previous repairs?

Parts replaced?

Technician findings?

Repeated failures?

If the answer depends on finding the right spreadsheet, paper file or person who remembers the job, the maintenance history exists in fragments.

A CMMS can provide a structure for connecting completed work with the equipment it belongs to.

The information still has to be recorded well enough to be useful.

Technicians need information where the work happens

Where maintenance happens matters.

A technician working throughout a plant, campus or group of facilities may not spend much time at a desk.

GSA documented this problem in its own use of Maximo, its computerized maintenance system. Building managers used the system to track service requests, work orders, repairs and preventive and predictive maintenance, but they sometimes had to write information on paper while in the field and enter it into the system later. Mobile access allowed them to create and inspect work orders while onsite.[3]

That example does not mean every maintenance team needs a mobile application.

It does suggest a useful question:

Does maintenance information move with the people doing the work?

Think about what technicians need before, during and after a job.

They may need the work order, equipment information, previous maintenance, instructions, documents or parts information. They may need to record labor, readings, notes, photographs, parts used or the work performed.

If the current process makes that difficult where the work actually happens, include that problem in your evaluation.

Basic maintenance reporting requires reconstruction

Try answering a few questions about your operation:

• How much maintenance work is currently open?
• What is overdue?
• Which preventive-maintenance work was completed?
• Which assets are receiving repeated attention?
• How much labor is being recorded against maintenance work?
• What kinds of problems occur most often?

You may not need every one of those answers.

The questions that matter depend on the operation.

But if information your managers regularly need has to be reconstructed from several systems or records each time, that is another sign that the current process may be under strain.

Historical maintenance work orders can support analysis and maintenance decisions, but the quality of the underlying records matters. NIST research has shown that missing, inaccurate or inappropriate maintenance data can reduce the accuracy of KPI calculations and trend analysis.[4]

A new system does not eliminate that responsibility. It gives the organization a structure in which to collect and use the information.

Coordination is becoming a bigger part of the job

Complexity can enter a maintenance operation in many ways:

• more assets;
• more technicians;
• multiple shifts;
• multiple facilities;
• contractors;
• larger preventive-maintenance schedules;
• more spare parts;
• more people submitting requests;
• additional reporting requirements;
• connections with purchasing, inventory, ERP or other systems.

None of those creates an automatic threshold at which you need a CMMS.

Look instead at the coordination required.

If the maintenance team is spending increasing effort keeping its records, schedules, assignments and status information synchronized, the current tools may be reaching their practical limit.

You may not need a CMMS yet

There is nothing inherently wrong with managing maintenance using simple tools.

Imagine a small facility with one person responsible for a manageable group of equipment.

Work requests are infrequent.

Preventive maintenance is straightforward.

The person responsible can see what is due, keep a useful equipment history and manage the work reliably with a spreadsheet and calendar.

Adding a CMMS could simply add another system to maintain.

Even a larger organization may have a current process that works well enough for its needs.

The question is whether there is a maintenance-management problem worth solving.

If you cannot identify one, you may not have a compelling reason to buy new software.

Problems a CMMS won't solve by itself

Software can provide structure for maintenance information and workflows. The organization still has to decide how maintenance should operate.

For example, a CMMS can give you a priority field.

Your organization still has to determine what the priorities mean.

A CMMS can schedule preventive maintenance.

Someone still has to determine which equipment requires preventive maintenance, what should be done and how often.

A CMMS can store maintenance history.

Technicians and other users still have to record useful information.

A CMMS can produce reports.

The records behind those reports still need to be sufficiently complete and accurate.

NIST research into technology implementation in maintenance management emphasizes understanding the organizational or process problem a technology is intended to address before deciding where technology belongs in the maintenance process.[1]

That is worth doing before a software evaluation begins.

A simple CMMS readiness check

You do not need a score.

Try answering these questions instead.

Work

Can you reliably see all open maintenance work?

Can you tell what should be worked on first?

Can you see who owns each job and its current status?

Preventive maintenance

Can you reliably see what preventive maintenance is coming due?

Can you tell what has been completed and what is overdue?

Equipment

Can you quickly find the maintenance history for an important asset?

Can you see what happened during previous repairs?

Technicians

Can technicians get the information they need where maintenance happens?

Can they record the important details of completed work without creating an unreasonable administrative burden?

Parts and resources

When it matters, can you connect the parts, labor and other resources used to the maintenance work?

Management information

Can you answer the maintenance questions your organization actually cares about without manually rebuilding the information every time?

Current tools

Is maintaining the spreadsheets, paper records, calendars, email threads or other tracking methods becoming work of its own?

Pay particular attention to the questions you could not answer confidently.

Those answers show where your current process deserves a closer look.

If you decide to explore CMMS, don't start with a feature list

Suppose your team identifies three problems:

Technicians working throughout the facility cannot easily see previous maintenance when they reach an asset.

Preventive-maintenance schedules are maintained separately from corrective work, making it difficult for supervisors to see the total workload.

Managers cannot easily see recurring problems on individual pieces of equipment.

You now have something much more useful than:

We need a CMMS.

You know what you need the system to help support.

Those observations can eventually become requirements.

The first might lead you to investigate mobile access and asset history.

The second might lead to requirements around scheduling, backlog and workload visibility.

The third might lead to requirements for consistent work-order records, equipment history and reporting.

This is also why copying someone else's CMMS feature checklist is a weak place to begin. Their operation may not work like yours.

Follow your own maintenance process first.

Look at how work is requested, prioritized, planned, assigned, performed, documented and reviewed.

Find the places where the current process is becoming difficult to manage.

Those are the beginnings of your requirements.

Next: CMMS vs. Spreadsheets: When Is It Time to Switch?

Spreadsheets can be remarkably useful maintenance tools.

The next guide looks more closely at where they work well, where they begin to strain, and what changes when maintenance work moves into a CMMS.

CMMS vs. Spreadsheets: When Is It Time to Switch? →