How To Choose The Best Maintenance Management (CMMS) Software

Posted on 18th Oct 2018

Get to know each product with free trial

A good way to start your search for the best maintenance management software is to sign up for the free trials or demo offered by leading maintenance management software providers. This will help you understand the main features and benefits of each software and do a comparison of different tools. The following are the best CMMS software solutions that have received the highest SmartScore rankings and user satisfaction rating in our maintenance management software reviews: Hippo CMMS reviews,Bigfoot CMMS, and eMaint. Visit their websites to learn if they offer a free trial or demo.

Targeted Businesses

Almost all industries need maintenance and maintenance management software can help them in this regard. Here are four main types of businesses that can use this system:

Production maintenance – These companies produce products. They have heavy equipment, forklifts, assembly lines, and machines that need maintenance.
Facility maintenance – These companies maintain apartment buildings, government buildings, theaters, etc. They can use the system to resolve water supply, HVAC, and structural issues.
Fleet maintenance – These companies maintain vehicles that are used for transportation. A good maintenance management system can help to take care of their fleet of towing trucks, transport ships, city buses, pizza delivery vehicles, rental cars, etc.
Linear asset maintenance – These companies need to maintain assets that are miles long. Examples are a city’s water pipes and roads, a telecom company’s fiber-optic cabling, and the long lengths of electrical wiring used by energy utility companies.

What are Examples of Maintenance Management (CMMS) Software?

Hippo CMMS: Hippo is a user-friendly, affordable, and robust web-based maintenance management system for small business and large enterprises.
Bigfoot CMMS: Bigfoot CMMS is a computerized maintenance management solution. It is a cloud-based app that offers useful tools for needs of maintenance professionals worldwide.
eMaint: eMaint is an easy-to-use and flexible system that allows users to take control of all aspects of facilities and maintenance management.
Maintenance Connection: It offers a top notch maintenance management software to help companies stay on top of all their maintenance operations.
MPulse: MPulse CMMS offers scheduling, tracking, and reporting tools for facilities and equipment maintenance.

Types of Maintenance Management Software

Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) software – This type is used to monitor, manage, and extend the life of important assets.
Modular applications – These apps can be integrated into a single maintenance management system. This integration facilitates efficient interactions between different business units in a company.
Work Order Management Software – A work order is a request used to describe in detail any maintenance need.
Preventive Maintenance Software (PM) – A PM system is similar to work order management system and is used to communicate work orders. This software is used to schedule routine maintenance and to inform staff when repairs are needed.
Predictive Maintenance Software (PdM) – These solutions offer data-driven analytic functions that help to identify when an asset will require maintenance before any downtime occurs.
Fleet Maintenance Software – Enterprises with transportation fleets use this software to track details of drivers, vehicles, mileage, leasing contracts and more.
Facilities Maintenance Software (FM): This system includes work orders for preventive maintenance.
Computer Aided Facility Management Software (CAFM) – This software goes beyond maintenance needs and helps businesses to allocate all kinds of resources within the facility.

Key Features of Maintenance Management Systems

Once you’ve determined that you need a maintenance management system, it is time to analyze the features that can respond to that need. Our in-depth comparisons indicate that these are the compulsory ‘dish ingredients’ you should look for:

Total customization: Ideally, it shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to transform a brand new MM system into a personalized workplace. It is because of the desirable drag-and-drop functionality, which eases adding and transforming custom fields.

Mobile access: Due the fact that maintenance systems are supposed to make information available at any time, they must be mobile-friendly. You should be able to follow information, record damage, or pull asset reports on the go, using whatever internet-enabled device.

Flexible integration: Another thing each maintenance software provider should offer is flexible integration, meaning that you can connect your system with every information-reading machine, pre-built APIs/connectors, and enterprise programs supposed to pull/push data from it.

A robust feature-suite: The universal list of features each maintenance management system should possess goes as follows: Asset management, Prevention management, Inventory purchasing, Work orders, Unlimited guest requestors, Custom workflows, Custom API integration, Custom reporting, Role permissions, Compliance audit, Rotating assets , Multi-site management, RFQs, Rotating assets, Rebuilds, etc.

Benefits of Maintenance Management Systems

Before choosing a maintenance management system, you should prepare yourself, and create a list of benefits you expect to realize. This is important to avoid being dazzled by amazing functionality promises, and foremost, paying for expensive options you wouldn’t even use.

You may end up having a list of rare, business specific requirements, and that’s good because of the high probability of finding a program that can satisfy them. Since we can’t dive that deep into the core of every manufacturing operation, we’re going to summarize expectations prescribed to every business (highlighting that a maintenance system which lacks at least one of them is not a good maintenance system).

Robust metrics set

You can easily evaluate the impact of such systems, knowing that almost 50% of your operational budget is spent exactly on maintenance. Reducing rates after applying a good maintenance system go as high as 15 %, and that’s because all metrics that are relevant for uptime results are gathered in one place.

Stronger asset management

Capturing historical and current business data is a blood injection to your suffering asset management, and that should be enough to lead you towards a computerized maintenance solution. You need a system that will support your change, follow expanding technology trends, and respond to the demand for great maintenance practices – things maintenance systems wrap up one way or the other.

Smooth labor transitions

The key maintenance factor of every company is the human one, which means that the sudden disappearance of a skilled professional can cause critical damage to the welfare of one’s business. Now that experts get to choose from a variety of job offers, the risk is all the more.

A maintenance management system can be your defense wall in such cases: the historical knowledge of a particular employee won’t be irreversibly lost because it will keep it in the standard repository which will make it available for every newcomer taking over a position.

Sustainable competitive advantages

Computerized maintenance managers empower a chain of knowledge-intensive actions deriving from robust informational databases. Knowledge is what connects variable wealth with sustainable success, and helps you plan investment timing, upgrades, and innovations. The role of your system will be to provide that knowledge in a way which makes your competitive advantages and strengths obvious.

Compliance with government regulations

Liability is more than critical to every business environment and is, unfortunately, a sphere where one can’t rely on their own readiness to respond to standards and requirements. Maintenance management software relieves a big deal of this burden, as it orientates performance towards reducing work-related incidents and liability hazards. Having it on board would mean that you don’t have to worry about non-compliance claims, wrong documenting practices, certified compliance, or unsafe work methods. Thanks to the system, you will monitor and record everything that is happening in your company.

Prioritization of skills

Technology is evolving all the time, and it requires professional skills you hadn’t even heard about a few years ago. Regardless of the competence of the person you’re employing, it may turn out that his education is not enough to respond to the technical program of your institution, which is where training becomes essential. Maintenance programs enable you to prioritize technical skills, and to predict the ones which are required for fulfilling a vacancy. Preparing employees in such a way will save significant amount of time, money, and effort.

Pricing overview

Maintenance management tools are often offered in different price ranges that it’s almost impossible to round up an average price expectation. Pricing structures are different for every product, especially when you consider the modules/features you would have to add, the same as extra support/training expenses.