CMMS Blog

If you complete tasks A, B, and C offline (in that order), but when you sync, the system processes them as C, A, B - you could break critical dependencies. In maintenance work, sequence MATTERS a ton.

One clever maintenance manager I know created a monthly "inventory lottery" where they randomly selected a part, and if the system count matched the physical count, someone on the team won a gift card. Suddenly, everyone cared about accurate counts!

Those shelves packed with expensive components that haven't moved since Obama was president? That's literally cash gathering dust. And it might be killing your maintenance department's performance.

CMMS stands for Computerized Maintenance Management System. Think of it as the digital brain that makes sure all the equipment and facilities in your business do not break down at the worst possible moment.

The maintenance guys just shrugged - "That's how it's always been." We lost thousands in production time monthly because nobody tracked anything properly.

That's exactly why I became obsessed with CMMS systems.

Every maintenance department has a Bob (sometimes literally named Bob). Bob's been there 15+ years. Bob knows where every pipe goes, which machines are temperamental, and exactly how hard to kick the east loading dock door when it sticks.

Bob also hates change.

My buddy Mike - maintenance director over at Memorial Hospital - calls these "the breadcrumbs that keep you from getting lost in the chaos." Smart guy.

Remember my buddy Mike's favorite saying: "The best maintenance is the kind nobody notices happened at all."

Instead of waiting for things to break down spectacularly (usually during your busiest time), you step in early with planned interventions.

Ever had your car make that weird noise for weeks, and you just turned up the radio instead? Then one day - BAM - you're stuck on the side of the highway calling a tow truck? Congratulations, you've experienced 'Reactive Maintenance' in its purest form.

Predictive maintenance is like having a crystal ball for your equipment. Instead of just hoping things won't break, you're monitoring for specific signs that indicate a problem is developing - but hasn't caused a failure yet.

A medium-sized automotive parts supplier I worked with calculated their first-year CMMS ROI at 347%. The biggest contributor wasn't any fancy predictive feature — it was simply eliminating the production downtime that happened when preventive maintenance tasks fell through the cracks.

A state university's facilities team was drowning in paper work orders and struggling to maintain aging infrastructure across 200+ buildings. Their maintenance supervisor, a 30-year veteran, initially resisted the CMMS implementation.

"I thought it was just more administrative burden", he told me.

Back in 2008, when I first consulted for a mid-sized dairy processor in Wisconsin, their maintenance "system" consisted of three overstuffed binders, countless sticky notes, and Pete, a maintenance supervisor who somehow kept everything running through sheer force of will and an impressive memory.

I've worked with wind companies managing 300+ turbines across three states. Without location - based maintenance tracking, their crews were zigzagging like drunk bees between turbines. With proper geographic asset management through their CMMS, they slashed travel time by nearly 40%.

A manufacturing client once asked me for the "quick version" of EAM implementation. I laughed. Then I realized they were serious. Six months into their "quick" implementation, they finally understood why I'd laughed. There are no shortcuts to proper asset management transformation.

Last week, I was meeting with a frustrated maintenance director - let's call him Jim. His company had spent six figures on a shiny new CMMS last year. "We've got this fancy system," he said, gesturing to his laptop, "but we're still having the same asset problems. I thought this would fix everything."