What Is Maintenance Management Software?

maintenance management software

Maintenance management software helps organizations maximize operational efficiency by centralizing, managing, and optimizing all asset and facility maintenance activities in one platform. Specifically, it can streamline maintenance processes, such as repairs, so maintenance technicians are more productive. It also dramatically improves asset performance and ensures safety and compliance while decreasing unplanned downtime and costs.  

Today, there are many types of facility management software and asset tracking software to choose from depending on your business needs:

  • A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). This type of software focuses on asset and facility maintenance throughout the operations phase of the asset lifecycle.
  • An enterprise asset management (EAM) system. This solution facilitates asset management throughout the entire lifecycle, e.g., from commission and procurement to operations, maintenance, disposal, and replacement.  
  • An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. An ERP manages day-to-day activities and data flow between departments such as accounting and manufacturing.
  • New and emerging technologies. This is software that uses sensors, 3D printing, or the industrial IoT for remote monitoring.

Many modern and full-featured maintenance software programs today contain functionalities of all these facility and asset management tools.

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How Can CMMS Maintenance Management Software Benefit Your Business?

Pen and paper, Excel files, disconnected legacy systems. They are still widely used today and are causing recurring problems in maintenance management efforts.

  • Reactive maintenance care practices
  • Costly delays in production
  • Safety and compliance concerns
  • Difficulty managing people and processes
  • High equipment downtime
  • Difficulty meeting KPIs and metrics

The right maintenance management software and tracking program can help your organization overcome these pain points by effectively managing work orders, automating scheduling processes, conducting maintenance tasks on mobile devices, and developing effective preventive maintenance strategies. Here is more on the benefits you can expect from using comprehensive maintenance management software:

Reduce Downtime

Reduce downtime

Stepping away from reactive maintenance work practices and moving toward regularly scheduled preventive maintenance can:

  • Increase equipment availability
  • Eliminate waste and rework
  • Extend asset life
  • Slash unplanned downtime and save time
  • Optimize production

Maximize Compliance and Audit Readiness

The right CMMS software can help maintenance and facility management teams stay prepared for audits and changing compliance regulations. Use the software, specifically, to:

  • Establish standard operating procedures (SOPs) for health and safety
  • Track employee training and compliance
  • Keep an accurate record of compliance-related training and tasks
  • Manage permits and important audit documents

Lower Costs Immediately and Over Time

A CMMS maintenance management software can cut costs by streamlining key processes, including inventory, work order, purchase order management, and preventive maintenance strategies. It can also cut day-to-day expenses, such as labor, inventory, and warranty costs.

Improve Team Management and Technician Productivity

Many maintenance management software solutions offer features that simplify team management, including key and lock management, mobile access, a device-agnostic user interface, technology ticketing, API access, and more.

Execute Effective Preventive Maintenance Strategies

A CMMS can help standardize preventive tasks and manage the information needed to execute forward-thinking preventive maintenance strategies. This can be done by:

  • Creating triggers that automate routine maintenance
  • Using remote monitoring and IoT sensors to allow for a more predictive maintenance approach
  • Standardizing preventive tasks to avoid unplanned downtime

Truly Understand Equipment Life Expectancy

Effectively predicting asset performance — and pre-empting asset failure — can increase facility uptime, maximize asset longevity and save your organization thousands of dollars over time. These cost savings not only come from decreased downtime but also due to more effective inventory management (with fewer emergency part orders) and, more broadly, accurate evaluation of spending practices.

Inform Your Capital Planning Efforts

capital planning

Unexpected downtime or equipment replacements can throw a wrench into capital planning efforts. With the best maintenance management software, you can reduce these concerns and execute more effective forecasting and budgeting. This, in turn, can help you streamline your spending budget and reduce overall asset management costs.

What Are Must-Have Features of Top Maintenance Management Software?

maintenance management software

Finding the right maintenance management software can take time and dedication. Still, most facility and asset managers look for these features when choosing between the many software options for maintenance management that are available on the market:

  • Asset Tracking Lists
  • Work Order Management Tool
  • Mobile Device Capabilities
  • MRO Inventory and Spare Parts Management
  • Maintenance Reporting and Dashboards
  • Comprehensive Integrations
  • Enterprise Asset Management
  • Full-Featured Security
  • Detailed Asset Repair History
  • Maintenance Scheduling

Asset Tracking List

Maintenance Connection’s asset tracking system allows you to view all relevant asset details in one centralized location, including asset make, model, serial number, purchase date, and related documentation like maintenance history and warranty information.

Work Order Management Tool

Providing a tool that helps you manage work orders will allow your team to proactively create, check, track, prioritize and assign work requests across locations and devices. Your maintenance teams can also see essential information – like past work orders, related images or documents, warranty information, and maintenance history – directly within the work order. This can ultimately improve maintenance tracking processes and increase employee efficiency.

Mobile Device Capabilities

mobile device

Allowing operators and technicians to input information and view critical documentation on-site using the MC Express mobile app can increase efficiency, streamline processes, decrease delays and help ensure that documents are up-to-date and always complete.

MRO Inventory and Spare Parts Management

Overstock, hard-to-find parts, and missing inventory can skyrocket costs and negatively impact efficiency and the execution of work orders. Maintenance Connection can simplify inventory parts management by helping users track inventory parts, access supplier and vendor information, and automate inventory ordering. This can ultimately save time, reduce inventory costs and avoid costly mistakes.

Maintenance Reporting and Dashboards

Actionable data and insights into key metrics –asset performance, labor productivity, maintenance activities, and inventory costs – can help you identify weaknesses, improve your processes and ultimately create effective preventive maintenance schedules and plans.

Comprehensive Integrations

If your tools cannot effectively integrate with one another, your business will deal with incomplete information, missing information, delays, and more. Maintenance Connection integrates with your mission-critical tools to sidestep these concerns, including electronic document management systems (EDMS), remote monitoring systems, and your ERP.

Enterprise Asset Management

Maintenance Connection has robust enterprise asset management features, so you can not only manage maintenance during the operational part of the asset lifecycle but also increase asset health throughout the asset lifecycle.

Full-Featured Security

Ensure compliance, protect yourself against cyber threats, and manage your permissions effectively with Maintenance Connection’s fully customizable security features.

Detailed Asset Repair History

Comprehensive insight into the repair history of each asset can help you understand asset costs, predict when an asset will need maintenance, and make informed decisions about an asset’s value.

Maintenance Scheduling

The right maintenance scheduling software can help your organization automate and streamline your maintenance scheduling using calendars, usage-based triggers, mobile apps, notifications, and streamlined workflows. This can not only maximize efficiency but also save time and improve your overall asset health.

 

Maintenance Management Software Industries

maintenance management software by industry

Maintenance management software can help organizations in many asset-heavy industries to streamline their asset management, maximize productivity, and ultimately increase uptime and ROI.

Industrial & Manufacturing

Maintenance Connection CMMS is a complete solution that helps industrial teams and plant technicians manage their plant’s health to decrease equipment downtime and effectively manage physical assets across devices and locations. This can ultimately reduce equipment failures, diminish maintenance costs, and more.

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Hospitality

An excellent guest experience in resorts and hotels requires that everything runs smoothly behind the scenes. A robust maintenance management software can facilitate these efforts by helping users track and schedule service requests, reduce maintenance costs, keep important equipment (like swimming pools, fitness equipment, elevators, and dining equipment) running, and more.

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Healthcare

Asset maintenance in the healthcare industry isn’t just about increasing effectiveness and lowering costs — it’s about patient safety. The best maintenance management software can help healthcare professionals reduce downtime on critical assets, minimize inventory stock out and overages, improve efficiency and ultimately facilitate patient care.

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Education

In higher education, facility and asset management involves preventive maintenance schedules and procedures for a facility and equipment like theaters, libraries, labs, classrooms, dorms, administrative offices, and athletic facilities. A CMMS can facilitate this maintenance, helping to establish preventive maintenance schedules and ensuring that service requests are completed quickly and proactively.

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Government

Government operations face many ongoing maintenance pain points, including disparate records, high downtime, out-of-control budgets, and poor asset management. Maintenance management tools and reports can help resolve these concerns by automating maintenance requests, generating data-driven reports, and more.

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Retail

A maintenance management system can help retail outlets and chains develop preventive maintenance schedules for all their assets, including POS systems, signs, pipes, ceiling fans, HVAC units, computers, lighting, and more. This can ultimately help stores deliver a consistently excellent customer experience.

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FAQs: Best Maintenance Management Software

What Is Maintenance Management?

Maintenance management is the process of maintaining an organization’s assets, facilities, and resources. Effective maintenance management is within reach when you leverage maintenance management software like a CMMS or an EAM. It can help:

  • Standardize preventive and predictive maintenance practices
  • Centralize important data and documentation
  • Maximize transparency and collaboration
  • Integrate key facility and asset management systems
  • Maximize safety, compliance, and employee productivity

What Is CMMS Maintenance Software?

Computerized maintenance management software (CMMS) is an enterprise business system that helps companies automate, digitize and optimize their maintenance operations. The right CMMS solution can help your business solve your most pressing pain points. It prioritizes work orders, decreases equipment downtime, maximizes employee efficiency, and manages your budget from one comprehensive, centralized solution.

What Is the Best Software for Maintenance Management?

When researching the best CMMS software for your business, it’s important to remember your business’s unique position and needs. More specifically, consider your:

Budget

How much money can you spend on a CMMS, and how does it fit into your one, three, and five-year budget goals?

Broader Technological Ecosystem

Does the CMMS you’re looking at integrate well with your existing practices and systems?

IT Capabilities

Does your IT team have the technical know-how to operate your CMMS system effectively? Would they benefit more from an on-premise system or cloud-hosted solution?

UX

If your technicians, operators, and plant managers do not like the CMMS’ user interface, they will not use it — and low user adoption essentially defeats the purpose of a CMMS. Keep this in mind when selecting a system, and make sure that your team is on board.

What Are the Four Types of Maintenance?

There are four general types of maintenance philosophies, though there is some flexibility when it comes to descriptions and naming conventions. These include:

Corrective Maintenance

This type of maintenance is carried out when an anomaly or flaw is detected. This maintenance practice aims to fix the flaw and maintain uptime. Corrective maintenance tasks may be more cost-effective than preventive maintenance in the short term, but its short-sighted nature makes it an ineffective long-term strategy.

Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance is a strategy that involves a scheduled, forward-thinking approach based on key metrics and data points. An effective preventive maintenance strategy can ultimately increase asset life, maximize revenue and decrease equipment downtime.

Condition-Based Maintenance

Condition-based maintenance aims to prevent failure through regular asset checkups and performance monitoring. In other words, equipment is constantly assessed and maintained, which requires significantly more coordination and human resources than other strategies.

Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance, as the name suggests, aims to preemptively predict asset failures before they arise using data, sensors, and IoT technology. Because it relies so intrinsically on data and technology, predictive maintenance comes with a higher up-front cost, and it is not yet feasible for many organizations.

What Is the Difference Between a CMMS and an EAM System?

Both computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) and enterprise asset management (EAM) systems ultimately have the same purpose: to help organizations effectively manage their facilities and move from reactive to preventive maintenance strategies. That said, there are significant differences between the tools. A CMMS, on the one hand, works to streamline facilities management and asset maintenance during the operational part of an asset’s lifecycle. An EAM software, on the other hand, provides a broader range of capabilities that allow organizations to track, manage and analyze their asset performance throughout the entire asset lifecycle. Many modern and robust CMMS solutions, like Maintenance Connection, have EAM functionalities, and the system can be upgraded or downgraded as needed over time.

What Are the Challenges of Implementing a Maintenance Management Software?

Many challenges come with implementing maintenance management software, and effectively anticipating and sidestepping these challenges is key to effective long-term implementation. More specifically, you must consider challenges like:

User Adoption

Your team must know how to use the software and consistently incorporate it into their day-to-day work.

Integrations

The maintenance management software you implement must integrate with your existing technological infrastructure — otherwise, you won’t get the comprehensive big-picture insights you need to maintain effective preventive maintenance strategies.

Your Budget

Look for hidden costs and make sure that you know how the CMMS will fit into your big-picture budget concerns.

Vendor Support

The right vendor will act as a partner, answering questions and helping with long-term training to maintain adoption and software efficacy over time.

Is CMMS the Same as SAP?

Systems, applications, and products, or SAP, is a type of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software used by every department in an organization. It contains hundreds of modules, including a SAP plant maintenance (PM) module, used to manage maintenance processes. A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) is a purpose-built software explicitly focused on maintenance management.

Who Can Use a Maintenance Software?

Anyone looking to replace legacy systems, increase maintenance operations efficiency, cut costs, and reduce downtime will benefit from maintenance management software. Typical users include:

Maintenance Managers

Maintenance managers can use CMMS maintenance software to assign work orders, stay on top of preventive maintenance strategies, organize documentation, and maintain regulatory compliance.

Asset and Facility Technicians

Technicians can use a mobile-responsive, intuitive CMMS system to update work orders, check inventory, update asset condition information, and access relevant asset documentation.

C-Suite Executives and Decision Makers

The data in a CMMS maintenance management software informs budgets, creates actionable reports, keeps maintenance activity up to date, and connects with other key departments and data sets.

Plant Managers

A maintenance manager can use a CMMS system to gain insight into big-picture maintenance metrics, maximize productivity, and streamline audits.

Inventory Managers

MRO inventory is notoriously challenging to manage. A CMMS can simplify things by allowing inventory managers to get a transparent understanding of what stock they have and where it is. They can also automate part orders and generate customizable reports on inventory usage, costs, and other vital metrics.

Asset Operators

Operators can relay up-to-the-minute asset information regarding work orders, asset status, breakdown status, cleaning schedules, and more.

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