A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) is an enterprise software that provides a dedicated framework for the creation, tracking, and management of work orders, alongside other dedicated tools for monitoring equipment history, scheduling preventive maintenance activities, and managing spare parts.
Computerized Maintenance Management System – CMMS is software that helps companies to manage and optimize the maintenance of their equipment, assets and buildings. It has become the central repository for all maintenance-related information so teams can move away from paper records and spreadsheets. At a high level, a CMMS makes it easier for maintenance teams to do their job by having everything in one place: work orders, asset history, maintenance schedules, spare parts inventory and performance data. This centralized system increases visibility, reduces errors and ensures timely completion of maintenance work.
A CMMS Software is a complete solution for managing & optimizing maintenance activities through a unified interface. It streamlines everything from issue identification, work order prioritization, and spare parts tracking to final resolution. The ultimate objective of this software is to speed up maintenance and repairs, prevent sudden equipment breakdown, and extend asset lifespan.
Computerized Maintenance Management System are designed to support different maintenance strategies including reactive maintenance, preventive maintenance (regular servicing) and predictive maintenance (predicting failures using data). A CMMS backs up these strategies to help organizations reduce downtime and increase the life span of their assets.
The first thing to know about CMMS is that it allows you to store entire information about every physical asset that needs to be maintained in your facility, alongside their maintenance history, list of spare parts used, user manuals, SOP checklists, as well as a list of technicians, among other information. This ready availability of information makes maintenance activities easier to perform.
In its simplest form, maintenance is either responding to breakdown and repair requests or performing scheduled servicing and preventive maintenance. As soon as someone in the organisation reports an asset breakdown using CMMS, the request can be viewed by the designated maintenance supervisor within the system. Accordingly, the work order is generated and a suitable technician is assigned as per their availability. Since technicians too have access to the CMMS through their mobile app and web browser, they can instantly view work assigned and accept the work order from wherever they are.
Just when they begin working on the work order, technicians can start logging in their work hours and update the status of the job, like whether it is in-progress or completed. They can access asset-related information by scanning the QR code on the asset, and even order spare parts by raising a new purchase order or withdrawing inventory from the available stock.
Similarly, when preventive maintenance tasks are scheduled, the CMMS sends an alert to the team and automatically generates a work order in advance, which is assigned to the relevant technicians. So, that’s how the maintenance loop goes on in routine. Plus, whatever work has been done, every bit of it is recorded in the CMMS, including time, expenses, parts consumed, labour, subcontractor, which can be statistically analysed through reports to improve future maintenance tasks. This ensures complete transparency for stakeholders.
Let’s look at why a computerized maintenance management software is vital for asset-heavy industries.
CMMS is your primary safeguard against multiple risks you could be exposed to when you don’t manage your maintenance well. These risks could be factory accidents, financial loss, and lawsuits. For example, if the leading cause of an explosion in the boiler in a factory turns out to be a missed preventive maintenance, it can lead to serious legal implications for the organisation.
Organisations housing expensive equipment and imported machinery with costly spare parts must do everything possible to extend the useful life of their assets to improve their return on investment. In addition, installing a CMMS leads to a fundamental shift from breakdown culture, which is a habit of repairing only when the machine fails, to a culture of regular, proactive maintenance.
With comprehensive data available on maintenance history within the CMMS, decision-makers get the reports they need to make decisions on long-term capital expenditures. By analysing the repair frequency, costs, and downtime associated with old machinery, they can decide whether it is wise to replace the machinery or continue using it.
In India, physical asset maintenance must comply with the Factories Act, 1948, and increasingly with OSH Code 2020, which require that building, machinery, and equipment must be maintained to ensure employee safety, health, and welfare. Besides, to comply with ISO standards for quality, and industry regulations like Current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) enforced by the FDA, companies are expected to have a professional asset maintenance management system in place.
At the very least, every CMMS must have the ability to manage assets, work orders, corrective and preventive maintenance, spare parts, and technicians. Here’s more on what a CMMS includes.
One of the most valuable things about having a CMMS is that it allows you to build a centralised database of assets and organise them in a hierarchical order, including assemblies, sub-assemblies, and components, for all your locations. It allows you to add as many assets as you need to, group them by family, while retaining the flexibility to make changes.
For a growing organisation with multiple assets, managing a series of work requests can quickly become chaotic. CMMS converts work requests into work orders and links them with asset ID, with the description of the issue, priority levels, and the type of maintenance being performed. Inclusion of asset photos, videos, notes, safety procedures, engineer or subcontractor assigned transforms how work is completed.
To keep assets in healthy working condition, companies have to schedule preventive maintenance. Whether it is oil check and greasing, or part replacement, CMMS allows you to create a maintenance plan for every asset. You can initiate maintenance either by calendar or equipment runtime, reserve spare parts in advance, and coordinate with other departments to schedule downtime.
Despite the best maintenance efforts, breakdowns can happen. CMMS makes sure that repair requests are instantly executed to minimise disruption. From work request and work order generation to assignment of technicians and ensuring the availability of spare parts, everything flows smoothly within the CMMS workflow.
Even though most companies spend a great deal on buying spare parts, the associated costs often remain hidden because they don’t formalise maintenance. With CMMS, you can create purchase orders, track parts consumption, and know exactly what you spend on every asset. You can maintain adequate stock levels in your spare parts storeroom and track stock entry and withdrawals.
Whenever a work request is generated, it is the responsibility of the maintenance supervisor to allocate the right personnel for the job. As CMMS contains technician details, their skills, schedule, past repair work handled, supervisors can make informed decisions. Further, listing of subcontractor vendors allows them to smoothly manage external resources needed for a task.
Maintenance work is performed by electricians, mechanics, and plumbers, who are rarely at their desks. Providing mobile access is the most practical feature in a CMMS, as users can access important information on assets, work orders, and schedules, right in the field. Maintenance managers on the move, too, can approve work requests, assign technicians, and track job status.
Even as a reliable CMMS helps you elevate maintenance standards, as a maintenance manager, you are more interested in numbers. What are the total hours spent on repairing a particular machine, the costs per worker, or how successful is your preventive maintenance programme? Custom reports give you the right answers. Critical indicators like MTTR and MTBF help you fine-tune your maintenance strategy.
There are several reasons why companies decide to implement a CMMS. Among them, these three are the most significant.
CMMS gives a firm grip on resources like labour and spare parts, and even the equipment used to maintain an asset like a drill machine and multimeters. It lets you respond efficiently to equipment breakdowns, minimising overtime labour costs and urgent parts purchasing. Carefully planned preventive maintenance further avoids premature parts replacement.
CMMS brings discipline to asset maintenance, ensuring no asset stays unattended and ignored. Preventive maintenance schedules in CMMS ensure assets are serviced at the right time and in the right manner, with due compliance with the manufacturer’s instructions. This significantly improves their performance and lifespan.
A significant advantage of CMMS is higher uptime and operational continuity, resulting in output that meets the target. It creates a well-organised system enabling people to follow the best maintenance protocols and improve service efficiency. Transparency through key metrics ensures that the workforce can be held accountable and motivated to continuously improve. Team collaboration helps solve the most challenging situations in the least possible time.
For a company that has always managed maintenance manually via registers, WhatsApp, and spreadsheets can possibly view CMMS as a cost centre. Rather, CMMS is a tool to save costs by simplifying maintenance processes, by organising everything onto a single platform. To convince the management to invest in it, you must first calculate how much time, money, and productivity you end up losing without a CMMS.
Leading CMMS systems like DimoMaint MX have an intuitive and straightforward design that ensures that field maintenance staff with bare minimum technical knowledge can immediately start using it. When considering CMMS options, it is advisable to keep key technicians by your side. First-hand experience with the platform ensures higher adoption rates from the beginning.
Setting up a CMMS might seem like a task, which is quite understandable, considering it has never been done before. This includes entering all the locations, assets, setting up asset hierarchy and maintenance workflows, and training the team to independently use the software. But once that is done, you are all set to simplify your life and observe the improvements.
To be very clear, even the best ERP software for all their immense capabilities are not designed to execute maintenance. As a specialised tool, a CMMS is solely focused on day-to-day maintenance and repair operations. It helps execute different types of maintenance like condition-based maintenance, preventive and corrective maintenance, enables asset maintenance history tracking, stores SOPs and safety checklists. You can efficiently assign technicians, manage work orders and spare parts to lower your downtime and costs.
CMMS can contain sensitive information related to assets, including financial and strategic data, which many companies may not want to share with every member on the maintenance team. Role-based access controls ensure that you can control who sees what information. Moreover, to protect your data from cyber security breaches, cloud CMMS vendors follow industry best practices and take compliant security measures and regular backups.
With several CMMS available in the market, it is easy to get distracted from your real purpose. Here’s how you can narrow down your options and choose the one that best suits your requirements.
CMMS stands for Computerized Maintenance Management System, whereas the full form of EAM is Enterprise Asset Management. While CMMS explicitly refers to asset maintenance software, the term EAM can either refer to EAM software or a broader approach to maintaining and managing assets through a blend of CMMS software, other business and financial management tools, and organisational capabilities.
As a technology, it was CMMS that came first – a system to simplify asset maintenance and improve asset uptime. However, with growing organisational requirements, the concept of CMMS gradually evolved into EAM, linking asset maintenance with the overall business management strategy. This helped businesses gain sharper insights into the total cost of ownership of assets.
If your CMMS has analytical capabilities and allows you to expand the scope of asset maintenance through integration with other business tools, you indeed step into the territory of enterprise asset management.
A CMMS’s key strength lies in its ability to reduce both downtime and costs by giving you complete control over assets and maintenance operations. By managing work orders, labour, spare parts, and preventive maintenance schedules, it helps companies align with global best maintenance practices.
Among the leading CMMS solutions is DimoMaint MX, a cloud-based software built for organisations of all sizes and industries. Beyond a great CMMS, you will experience behavioural change in your organisation. Technicians and maintenance supervisors collaborate and plan maintenance in the most efficient manner, resulting in fewer breakdowns, cost savings, and extended asset life.
Manage the complete lifecycle of your assets with DimoMaint MX CMMS software. Improve uptime, reduce breakdowns, and streamline maintenance operations.
Explore moreCMMS is a Computerized Maintenance Management System that facilitates physical asset maintenance, allowing smooth execution of corrective and preventive maintenance tasks.
The cost of a CMMS depends on various factors like company size, features required, the number of users, and deployment model, whether on-premise or cloud CMMS.
No, CMMS is not an ERP. CMMS is a specialised tool for asset maintenance. On the other hand, ERP is a business management software to manage finance, supply chain, production, and distribution
If you have physical assets and equipment that require maintenance, most leading CMMS systems, including DimoMaint MX, can be easily adapted to meet the specific needs of your industry.
Cloud CMMS software like DimoMaint MX works efficiently in offline mode, allowing workers to view work orders, record maintenance tasks, and scan QR codes. As soon as the network connectivity is restored, the CMMS auto-syncs with the online database. Besides, an on-premise CMMS, which is hosted on local company servers, is designed to work without the internet.
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