Cloud Based Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) and Small to Medium Sized Businesses

I started my professional life as a maintenance engineer in a power company. That was a little over 10 years ago and at the time the company I was working for relied heavily on maximo, a very comprehensive asset management solution from IBM. It was a complex system that required hours of user training and literally millions of dollars in customization and equipment. In the end, the company had a versatile and extremely powerful tool that linked assets to documentation, spares and purchasing and automated the maintenance management of all the equipment from work request creation to work order flow. The reporting was excellent and anything that you wanted to know about the history of an asset - to the very components that make that asset up - was readily available.

After that experience, I was lucky enough to go through yet another amazing software in another company: SAP/ PM. PM for plant maintenance. In my opinion a superior solution to maximo. In this second case, all company procedures were managed by SAP from maintenance to HR to purchasing. Everything was inter-connected. The full SAP implementation took around one year and a half, and each module of SAP was deployed in sequence. There was a team of five full time people working on everything from installation to Training Maintenance to development and customization. Needless to say this was an extremely expensive operation.

In both situations described above, the companies benefitted immensely through the use of the software solutions to a point that would see them grinding to a halt should the systems fail. As a power user of the maintenance systems before and after the installation of SAP, I can confirm the increase in efficiency in company procedures once everything was automated. Needless to say, I'm a huge fan of good maintenance management software or, to use the industry jargon, CMMS, for Computerized Maintenance Management System.

After the two experiences described above, I accepted a job in the maintenance department of an entertainment venue. It was a little different from my previous job on conventional industry and utilities but it had to do with equipment maintenance nonetheless, so essentially it fit my background just fine. What I was not ready for though was how maintenance was managed, or perhaps I can say that I was not ready for how maintenance was NOT managed. When I started, record keeping was minimal and there was simply no spare parts control other than people's memory! Granted that the organization was not that complex, especially when compared with my previous jobs: I went from a 250 strong maintenance team to a 15 person team. Yet, no matter your organization's size, if you deal with machinery and equipment that is used in commercial applications, you must have a way to schedule and organize jobs and technicians, control spares and also easily retrieve that information to assist on future maintenance tasks or to prove that actions were taken in order to ensure the equipment is operational and safe at all times.

The schedule of tasks is not hard to implement with conventional tools such as outlook or Google calendar. I have read articles and forum posts that say outlook is all a small company needs to control maintenance tasks. From a simple scheduling point of view, I couldn't agree more but overall there is a fundamental flaw: extremely difficult information retrieval. What that implies is that maintenance task are not optimized since most job procedures will be reinvented over and over again. Note that even if records are kept, the effort that needs to go into organizing them all is enormous especially as years go by, technicians leave and information starts to pile up. It will only be a question of time before technicians bypass the retrieval of information completely and immediately start a job even if it means learning procedures from scratch. This is not an efficient system at all!

The same goes for spare part control. If your organization manages more than fifty spares, you would do much better with some sort of inventory control tool. These tools provide not only quantity, storage location information and vendor contacts but they also link spares to work orders and from there to the actual system or asset where the spare was used. Imagine the potential for cost control calculations if that information is available.

So what are the solutions for maintenance management for small to medium size businesses? Obviously, SAP or maximo are out of the question not only due to the high implementation cost but also because these are overly complex tools that frankly a small or medium sized organization does not require. Besides, they have high recurring costs related to IT systems maintenance that probably require several dedicated full-time staff.

More and more industry key players are of the opinion that cloud-based solutions are the way to go for small and medium sized companies. This is what my company went for and it was a very good idea! In fact we developed a system in house due to the lack of proper options in the market at the time - there were a few online CMMS solutions but virtually all of them aimed to do every single thing for every single company in the world and were therefore totally over engineered for 90% of the applications with a price that matched.