6 Steps to Choosing the Best CMMS Software

If you are here, you probably know by now that Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) simplify maintenance work and increase productivity.

However, suppose you’ve chosen one of the clunkier solutions. In this case, you may have noticed that the time your maintenance team spends navigating the poorly designed software costs your team valuable hours of productivity.

With that, let’s talk about the steps to evaluate and select the best software out of the many alternatives currently on the market.

Choosing the Best CMMS Software

1. Define Your Goals

To identify your organization’s specific needs and goals for a CMMS, start by assessing your current maintenance processes. Identify any challenges your company faces and maintenance inefficiencies you want to eliminate. Consider factors such as:

• the size of your organization,
• the types of assets you have and any critical parts required to keep them running,
• the number of maintenance tasks and procedures you need to manage,
• If applicable, your current work request and work order software capabilities, and
• any specific industry requirements and state and federal regulations you need to comply with.

Next, consider what you want to achieve with a CMMS.

Common goals for manufacturing companies include improving maintenance efficiency, reducing downtime, increasing asset lifespan, managing inventories, and reducing maintenance costs.

Begin to think about any features that can help with these goals. For example, if you want to improve asset lifespan, you’ll need a CMMS with robust asset tracking features. Similarly, reducing downtime requires preventive maintenance functionality to allow you to address minor problems beforehand and, consequently, to prevent breakdowns.

Once you clearly understand your organization’s specific needs, use this information to guide your evaluation of the different CMMS software options.

2. Research and Compare CMMS

Research vendors offering CMMS solutions. Compare the CMMS software features, including usability and support services.

Search online for reviews and CMMS software comparisons of the different work order software vendors. Consider these key factors:

Capabilities

Ensure the software has the features and capabilities your organization needs to support and automate its specific maintenance processes and goals.

These may include asset management, work requests, purchase orders, preventive maintenance, work order management, and reporting. Think of the goals you laid out in step one and consider what specific features further their achievement. Is managing inventory high on your list? You’ll need a CMMS with a parts module, barcode functionality, and automated purchase orders.

User-Friendliness

Choose a CMMS that is easy to use and navigate, with a user-friendly interface and clear instructions. Being proactive here will make it easier for your team to adopt and use the software daily. MaintainX, for example, was recently ranked highest in the ease-of-use category on Capterra.

Security

When searching for a CMMS solution, look for a strong record of confirmed security measures, reliability, and uptime. These days, there’s no reason to choose a CMMS that could jeopardize your organization’s data security.

Consider the CMMS itself and how it protects any data you provide. You should also consider the level of control they offer. The right software will offer organizations control over user permissions.

Beyond the software, consider the CMMS vendors themselves and how they manage customer data. Where and how do they store your data? What data encryption do they use? How regularly do they perform data backups? Who handles your data, and how does the vendor vouch for them?

Make sure your chosen vendor complies with broader regulatory requirements. The MaintainX platform, for example, has earned ISO 27001:2013 certification for the MaintainX platform and its Montreal office. In addition, MaintainX is both SOC2 compliant and GDPR compliant.

Implementation

Choosing a CMMS is one thing. Getting it up and running is another. How easy is it to implement a new CMMS in your organization, and what kind of support does your vendor offer? Look for a CMMS provider that simplifies your integration and implementation processes, from maintenance planning to setup.

Find a vendor that offers more than generic implementation resources and provides you with a personalized approach to execute smooth implementation for your team. If it’s hard to know who to trust in this area, take it from G2, an industry leader in aggregating customer reviews. It recently named MaintainX #1 for “most implementable” and “easiest setup.”

Customer Support

Choose a software vendor that offers comprehensive support and training resources, such as online tutorials, user manuals, and technical support. Beyond implementation, you want a vendor that is easy to reach if problems arise.

Pay close attention to the kind of support offered by different vendors, how easily you can reach them, and how quickly they respond to support requests. Aim for vendors who offer multiple channels of communication. That way, you know, for example, that if you can’t find a maintenance management solution to your problem listed in FAQs, a live chat is available to help, and, in the event of that failing, emails and phone calls are options.

Again, refer to customer reviews in this area. For example, MaintainX’s Wall of Love hosts a range of reviews from excited customers.

Customizability

Pay attention to how adaptable a CMMS will be to your specific needs. Many providers offer features that are great in theory but won’t fit your unique circumstances. At a minimum, you need software that allows you to:

• Add custom fields to work orders
• Create custom reports and dashboards
• Create custom templates
• Customize feature labels
• Change currency used in app

3. Create a Shortlist of Potential CMMS Options

After researching and comparing different options based on the factors above, and you have identified a few software options, request demos or trials of each one to see how the software works in practice.

Be sure to provide the software vendor with detailed information about your organization and its specific needs and goals. Sharing this information will help the vendor tailor the demo to your needs.

The demo should give you a good understanding of if and how the CMMS can support your maintenance operations. Again, pay close attention to usability. How intuitive is the app? Is it available in multiple formats (mobile, desktop, etc.)? If it is a mobile CMMS, is it available on both Android and iOS?

When reviewing the features of a CMMS, consider these key factors:

Asset Management

Asset management is a combination of asset management and inventory management. It requires the perpetual balancing of several moving parts, including the development of standard operating procedures, customer retention, and predictable profit margins. Of course, the larger the company, the more assets it likely requires to meet its goals. And the more important asset inventory management becomes to scaling your efforts.

Reliable management programs are crucial to ensuring smooth operations, customer satisfaction, and cost conservation across company lines. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for operational managers to procrastinate setting up efficient organizational systems when it comes to asset inventory management.

The software should allow you to easily manage and track your organization’s asset performance, including asset location, condition, and maintenance history. For example, MaintainX allows you to scan QR and bar codes to bring up real-time asset history.

Preventive Maintenance

Preventive Maintenance seeks to keep assets in good condition by conducting maintenance activities before problems arise. Regularly maintaining assets and addressing minor problems helps mitigate the development of major problems, prevent breakdowns, and reduce unplanned downtime. Preventive maintenance also optimizes spending, with studies showing that it can save facilities as much as 18 percent in maintenance costs.

Crucial to the success of a preventive maintenance program is maintenance scheduling. Using repeatable work orders, maintenance managers can create maintenance schedules well in advance, assign tasks to team members and teams, and monitor their progress. We mentioned in the previous section that you should choose a CMMS with asset-tracking features. This functionality also optimizes preventive maintenance by storing historical asset data that informs your maintenance scheduling. You’ll know how frequently to schedule asset maintenance based on performance data that your CMMS monitors.

Digital standard operating procedures (SOPs) are vital to successful preventive maintenance. Team members might have different ideas about handling tasks, but digital SOPs eliminate the need for trial and error, ensuring workers stick to tried, tested, and dependable solutions. Look for a cloud-based CMMS offering templates to create digital SOPs and checklists to simplify processes. MaintainX’s Global Procedure Library contains manuals, procedures, templates, and checklists across equipment types, industries, and use cases.

That said, digital procedures sometimes can’t cover every possibility. As such, look for CMMS apps that offer customizable and dynamic SOPs with conditional logic. Conditional fields allow you to apply if-then logic to procedures, causing fields to change dynamically based on user input.

Work Order Management

What’s great about robust work order management software is its ability to simplify your work order process flow.

The best work order software will allow your company to bypass pen-and-paper and spreadsheet workflows to:

• Create and submit work requests digitally.
• Allow maintenance managers to respond quickly to work requests. Managers can see duplicate work requests or maintenance requests that have been resolved to eliminate duplicating efforts.
• Improve the quality of work requests. For example, staff reporting a breakdown are more likely to remember to include relevant data about it in the request when the templates and checklists prompt them to.
• Track work orders from start to finish to maintain detailed work histories and audit trails. Comprehensive audit trails help facilitate analyses and investigations when issues arise. They also help prove regulatory compliance by keeping relevant data in one place.
• Collaborate with other team members via instant chat (more on this shortly).

After work requests, the next step in a work order process flow is automatically converting approved work requests to work orders.

For example, in MaintainX, users can create work orders based on individual messages. All a user needs to do is click on a message in chat to create a work order when prompted.

Automation is another benefit of the work order process. CMMS software users can create new work orders well in advance and automate their repetition. You can create maintenance work orders today to automatically repeat every day, week, or month. This feature is vital for preventive maintenance procedures that depend on scheduled routines.

Mobile Connectivity and Push Notifications

The best CMMS apps are native first and mobile friendly to help you get the most from a work order software’s automation features. Many work order management systems offer web apps, and while this is great, software systems with mobile access can be crucial both on-premises and in the field.

Mobile work orders eliminate the need to depend on institutional memory. When a task is due, the assigned staff receives notifications on their mobile devices. This can be the difference between staff conducting field service and facility maintenance tasks on time and a breakdown because someone didn’t adhere to the schedule.

A CMMS with a native-first mobile app and cloud-based storage allows staff to access SOPs from anywhere. The right CMMS platform can take it even further by providing access to standard SOPs across industries and equipment. This functionality ensures staff can find any guidance they need.

Reporting and Analysis

Even without software, measuring your company’s progress by tracking specific metrics and KPIs is essential. Often, you’ll need to record this data separately or extract it from your equipment maintenance records and then conduct your analysis.

However, work order software can make this much easier for you. MaintainX CMMS, for example, comes with a reporting module that helps to analyze your data and generate robust, actionable insights within seconds. Use custom dashboards to accelerate your administrative reporting, highlight ways to improve, and benchmark goals.

Beyond just time tracking, for example, you can identify trends and patterns with specific metrics like Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF). The MaintainX Reporting module is customizable, so you can get insights into how specific assets are behaving and how your team is performing. These insights enable you to make data-driven decisions about organizing your maintenance schedules, prioritizing your spending, enhancing your facility management, and optimizing your overall operations.

Inventory Management

Depending on the size of your company, the CMMS system needs to provide robust parts and inventory management. The best manufacturing businesses employ inventory systems and management to track and manage their inventory, from placing purchase orders to tracking points of sale and parts usage. In today’s marketplace with supply chain challenges, inventory accuracy is crucial.

When your team members can identify what assets you have, where they are located, and how much they are worth (within seconds), they’re poised to make better decisions autonomously. A CMMS with QR code and barcode scanning functionality makes a big difference here—just scan a code to update inventory and access useful asset information instantly. By being proactive, teams can ensure they never run out of the necessary spare parts, thus reducing equipment downtime.

Automated low-quantity alerts simplify inventory management. With the right CMMS, you can automatically trigger purchase orders based on specified inventory level alerts you create. Look for a CMMS with a purchase orders feature that can integrate with third-party vendors.

Integration with Other Systems

The maintenance management software should be able to integrate via API with other systems, such as your organization’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) systems, to provide a seamless and efficient maintenance strategy. Can you link CMMS purchase orders to your accounting system? MaintainX, for example, offers integrations with crucial software across various industries, from fleet management to accounting and ERP. All in all, you want a CMMS tool with scalability, especially as you realize that Excel spreadsheets can no longer keep you organized and proactive.

Instant Chat

Outside of enabling preventive maintenance scheduling and automating inventory and equipment management, you can further optimize these processes through chat features. According to a ReportLinker study, close to 43 percent of office employees use instant messaging to “boost efficiency, productivity, and team collaboration.” Chat helps save time, avoid mistakes, and streamline team-wide and company-wide communication.

MaintainX is the only CMMS that offers in-app chat features.

A sound work order management system should help you create solid and robust standard operating procedures (SOPs) to guide maintenance processes. As discussed, using CMMS programs with mobile functionality will allow team members to access SOPs when they need guidance. Occasionally, there might be a reason to clarify a process or system with someone or to ask for help. In such a situation, you’ll be grateful you chose a CMMS with chat.

4. Ask for References and Read Case Studies

References are typically from other organizations that have used the software and can provide feedback on their experience. Get a sense of how the software has performed in a real-world setting and how it has helped the organization achieve its goals.

Case studies provide detailed information about how other organizations have used the software and its benefits. They can provide specific examples of how the software has helped organizations improve their maintenance operations and achieve their goals.

Currently, MaintainX ranks #1 in the “Users Most Likely to Recommend Category” in G2’s report, alongside leading in the “Easiest Setup” and “Most Implementable” categories.

5. Consider Costs and Benefits of CMMS Options

Now that you have narrowed down your options, compare the overall costs of the CMMS solutions.

The costs of CMMS software may include upfront licensing fees, ongoing subscription and upgrade costs, and the cost of implementing and training your team to use the software. Establish a budget regarding CMMS implementation costs and any other recurring fees.

Compare the costs to the software's potential benefits, such as improved maintenance efficiency, proactive equipment upkeep, reduced downtime, and increased asset lifecycle. Also, consider what other customers say about the Return on Investment (ROI). For example, MaintainX CMMS was awarded “Best Estimated ROI Mid-Market” in a recent G2 Report.

6. Choose the Best CMMS for Your Company’s Needs and Goals

Choose the CMMS system that best meets your organization’s needs and goals and provides the most significant value for your investment. Make sure to carefully review the contract and terms of service before committing. In addition, make sure customer support is 24/7 and support materials are readily available for you and your teams from anywhere, on mobile and desktop.

By following Steps 1-5, you can choose the top CMMS software best suited to your organization’s specific needs. It should provide the greatest value for your investment.

Overall, the features of CMMS maintenance software should:

• streamline facility management processes,
• support your organization’s specific maintenance strategies and goals, and
• provide the tools and capabilities needed to manage and optimize your maintenance operations.

Your maintenance workflows, from predictive maintenance to reactive maintenance, should smoothly translate into your CMMS scheduling capabilities.

MaintainX Is Your Best CMMS Solution

Choosing a CMMS with the features and functionalities we’ve explored above will take your maintenance strategy to the next level. If you’re wondering if you can find all of them in one place, MaintainX is here.

You can use MaintainX to:

• Create preventive maintenance work orders
• Facilitate reactive maintenance
• Chat instantly across your organization
• Maintain audit trails
• Track asset performance
• Analyze your performance and identify areas for improvement
• Create dynamic SOPs
• All from the cloud, across mobile and desktop

It’s not enough to just take our word for it, though. Try out MaintainX to see for yourself. To test our cloud-based mobile-first and desktop CMMS, use it in a way that simulates how your company will use it. Create and manage assets, schedule and track work orders and procedures, and use real-time reporting and analysis tools.

Ask your team members to try out MaintainX on their mobile devices to provide feedback on their experiences. And when you are ready, check out our pricing. Our Basic plan—for teams that need to digitize and track work orders—is free forever.