Companies taking their first steps toward preventive maintenance often start with homemade maintenance spreadsheets. A maintenance spreadsheet lets you log work orders, document upcoming maintenance cycles, and use filters to manipulate the data and produce lists of work completed. The issue is, spreadsheets don’t talk to each other and can’t send notifications to technicians in the field. This means that maintenance managers and technicians must rely on other systems like email, phone, pagers, offline trackers, or even sticky notes to get a full picture of the work that needs to be done.
While they add more value than just pen and paper, spreadsheets have obvious limitations.
A CMMS and maintenance excel spreadsheets share some basic similarities but are used differently. Below is a table that illustrates some of the differences:
CMMS
Excel
Definition
A CMMS automates the collection and analysis of data to optimize maintenance operations
Maintenance spreadsheets log work orders and document upcoming maintenance
Manipulate data and produce lists of completed work
Disadvantages
It may be more difficult to customizeIt may be susceptible to cyber attacks
Limited access that lives on personal drivesUsually leads to a physical paper trail
Nine advantages of a CMMS over a maintenance spreadsheet
1. Automated preventive maintenance triggers.
Preventive maintenance software helps reduce human error by ensuring PMs are triggered when they are due in compliance with regulatory or manufacturer requirements. A good CMMS system can also activate PMs based on a number of maintenance triggers including time, meter, and event.
2. Auditing and compliance.
A CMMS digitizes your paper trail. Work orders are documented electronically as you go, even if you are working offline. This simplifies things in case of an audit.
3. Analysis and reporting.
A CMMS will report on maintenance key performance indicators (KPIs) such as MTBF, MTTF, and availability with little effort. KPIs are used to evaluate current operations’ effectiveness, make organizational and personnel decisions, and determine whether assets need to be repaired or replaced. Built-in reports enable you to refine maintenance processes and improve asset availability, ultimately improving your bottom line.
4. Access.
Maintenance spreadsheets live on a personal drive on a desktop computer, with limited access. With a cloud-based CMMS, the data is stored on a remote server and can be accessed from anywhere over the internet. Most modern CMMS software also comes with a mobile app so you can access your CMMS via your phone or tablet in the field.
5. Centralization.
Plan, control, forecast, measure performance, evaluate, and report all from one system.
6. Real-time information.
See your organization’s maintenance activities in real-time. Managers can see which assets are offline, who is working on what, and what still needs to be done.
7. Communication.
Work requests submitted into the system can instantly be sent to the correct people. Technicians receive notifications automatically so they know what work is due.
8. Centralized database.
Your CMMS is a database of all equipment information, documents, manuals, schematics and images, and materials. No need for your technicians to carry around bulky schematics or manuals. Over time, this becomes a repository for historical data on your assets, giving you a fuller picture of an asset’s performance.
9. Supply chain management.
A CMMS will automatically track parts inventory, manage suppliers and vendors effortlessly and help you keep inventory costs optimized. When parts are consumed during work orders, the CMMS depletes stock levels in real-time. There’s no need to go back to the desk and update those stock cards. If the stock falls below minimum levels, the system will notify the required users or suppliers to start the reordering process.
Spreadsheets might be cheaper in the short term, but a CMMS will save you costs in the long run
While a maintenance spreadsheet is the cheaper option in the short term, it’s inflexible and doesn’t react to what is going on in your facility. Its ability to minimize the costs associated with downtime, stocking parts, and management reporting time is low, at best.
A CMMS streamlines and automates all of this, and many solutions can be customized to suit your maintenance processes, no matter the size of your organization. Any business can effectively deploy a CMMS in any market sector for efficient asset management.
Switching to new maintenance management software can be a daunting task for so many reasons. There’s always a learning curve, it can be expensive, and there’s no guarantee that everyone in your organization will be on board.
But making the switch doesn’t have to be painful as long as you have the right software provider. At Fiix, we spend a lot of time talking to maintenance managers about why they do and don’t want maintenance software. From those conversations, we’ve collected the four biggest concerns for anyone adopting a CMMS, and paired each concern with solutions and resources to help navigate the transition.
Four barriers to adopting a CMMS and how to overcome them
1. Cost
Budget and cost are the number-one barriers for anyone considering switching to maintenance management software. It’s an investment, no matter which way you cut it. But modern, cloud-based software is far less expensive than on-premise software.
On top of the relatively low cost of the software itself, a CMMS can have a huge impact on your bottom line. It can help turn your maintenance department from a cost center into a value center since the software helps you gather data on assets, and make more educated decisions about where and when to use maintenance resources.
Outlining the financial benefits of maintenance management software helps get buy-in from senior executives. But oftentimes, the people who really see the benefit of maintenance software—the maintenance managers and technicians who use it on a day-to-day basis—don’t have the time to build a really compelling business case.
First and foremost, do your research. You know your company and your maintenance team, so you’re in the best position to choose maintenance management software that will help, not hinder daily operations. Resources like Capterra and G2 are great for comparing different vendors and will help you ensure you get a solution appropriate for your company size and technical know-how.
Luckily, this is an easy problem to solve. We went ahead and created a resource to help you sell maintenance management software to the higher-ups at your organization.
3. Installation and setup
In terms of installation, cloud-based software is relatively straightforward because there’s no on-site installation. Once you buy your software, it’s just a matter of logging in and you’re good to go.
But how easy it is to import assets really depends on your specific maintenance management software. There are a lot of CMMS vendors, and their products run the gamut from very simple to requiring dedicated IT help to set up.
With Fiix, you can easily import existing assets and data from CSV or Excel, which makes setup really straightforward. We also have a huge number of resources to help you navigate the first few days and weeks with your CMMS, including an amazing team of customer success specialists who are here to support you along the way.
Getting the maintenance team on board
You can’t just drop new software on your maintenance team and expect them to adapt. Bad change management can lead to resistance, which can delay or even halt software implementation.
We’ve addressed this particular challenge before. Basically, there are three simple ways to help manage resistance to change which are detailed below:
Keep your people informed throughout the process. No one likes being told things are changing once the ball is already rolling. Get input from your maintenance team right from the start, so you can get a CMMS with features that bolster your team’s productivity. Be sure to stress that it’s mostly business as usual, and be clear about what parts of the routine will change to help people adjust to the transition.
Be specific about the benefits of maintenance management software. A CMMS can have a huge, positive impact on the day-to-day job of maintenance technicians and on how your facility runs as a whole.
Never skip training. There is nothing as good as hands-on experience to help a new system seem a lot less daunting. Check out our training page and support center to see what kind of support we offer both during and after implementation.
Although there are barriers to adopting maintenance software, they’re well worth facing for the long-term value the software adds to your team
Although there may be a bit of a learning curve when it comes to implementing maintenance software, the long-term value for your organization is unmatched. Purchasing a CMMS for example can result in fewer equipment breakdowns, longer asset life, better compliance standards, and much more.
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