18/02/2022 16:06 Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) | WBDG - Whole Building Design Guide

Computerized Maintenance Management

Systems (CMMS)
by Don Sapp
Plexus Scientific (http://www.plexsci.com/)
Revised and updated by Dan Eckstein, Total Resource Management (http://www.trmnet.com/)
Updated by the Facilities O&M Committee
Updated: 09-12-2016

INTRODUCTION
Know What Work Has Been Done on Your Assets and
What it Costs! WITHIN THIS PAGE
Introduction
Description
What Is CMMS? Application
CMMS is software that is used to schedule and record Lessons Learned
operation and preventive/planned maintenance activities Emerging Issues
associated with facility equipment. The CMMS can generate Major Resources
and prioritize work orders and schedules for staff to support
"trouble" calls and to perform periodic/planned equipment maintenance. Upon completion of a
work order, performance information, such as the date work was performed, supplies/inventory,
and manhours expended, typically is loaded into the database for tracking, to support future
operations/planning.

Not to confuse CMMS with a Computer-aided Facilities Management (CAFM) system, consider a
patient room in a hospital, e.g, ensuring that the Nurse Call System in the room is "properly
inspected, maintained, and repaired" is a CMMS activity. "Knowledge" about the medical
department staff; specific patient(s) in the room; the room's contents (phones, TVs, beds–
including whether they are moved from room-to-room); and equipment hook-ups (electrical,
oxygen, communications, etc.) relate to CAFM activities. CMMS and CAFM systems continue to
merge into Integrated Work Order Management Systems (IWOMS).

CMMS are used by facilities maintenance organizations to record, manage, and communicate
their day-to-day operations. The system can provide reports used in managing the organization's
resources, preparing facilities key performance indicators (KPIs) (/resources/reliability-centered-
maintenance-rcm)/metrics to use in evaluating the effectiveness of the current operations, and for

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making organizational and personnel decisions. In today's maintenance world, the CMMS is an
essential tool for recording work requirements, tracking the status of the work, and analyzing the
recorded data in order to manage the work, produce reports, and help control costs. Facility
professionals use tools to manage the planning and day-to-day operations and maintenance
activities required for a single facility or a large complex. These tools also provide all of the
information required to manage the work, the work force, and the costs necessary to generate
management reports and historical data.

DESCRIPTION
The goal of a maintenance manager is to employ a management system that optimizes the use of
valuable resources (manpower, equipment, material, and funds) to maintain facilities and
equipment. The system should provide for integrated processes, giving the manager control over
the maintenance of all facilities and maintainable equipment from acquisition to disposal. The
system should:

Address all resources involved,

Maintain maintenance inventory,
Record and maintain work history,
Include work tasks and frequencies,
Accommodate all methods of work accomplishment,
Effectively interface and communicate with related and supporting systems, ranging from
work generation through work performance and evaluation,
Support each customer's mission,
Ensure communication with each customer,
Provide feedback information for analysis, and
Reduce costs through effective maintenance planning.

A modern CMMS meets these requirements and assists the facilities maintenance manager with
work reception, planning, control, performance, evaluation, and reporting. Such a system will also
maintain historical information for management use. The manager should evaluate management
data requirements and establish electronic data needs prior to acquiring a new CMMS or additions
to/replacement of an existing system. The evaluation should include a return on investment (ROI)
(http://fmlink.com/articles/worth-the-cost-calculating-return-on-investment-for-cmms/) analysis
before investing in additional or new CMMS capabilities. The manager should only acquire what is
necessary to accomplish the maintenance organization's goals. The following paragraphs include
details of capabilities that may be included in a modern CMMS.

A. Operating Locations
The CMMS may include an application that allows an operator to enter and track locations where
equipment operates and organize these locations into logical hierarchies or network systems.
Work orders can then be written either against the location itself or against the equipment in the

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operating location. Using operating locations allows for the tracking of the equipment's lifecycles
(history) and provides the capability to track the equipment's performance at specific sites.

B. Equipment
The CMMS may include a module that allows an operator to keep accurate and detailed records of
each piece of equipment. This module would include equipment-related data, such as bill of
material, Preventive Maintenance (PM) (/resources/reliability-centered-maintenance-rcm)
schedule, service contracts, safety procedures, measurement points, multiple meters, inspection
routes, specification data (name plate), equipment downtime, and related documentation. This
equipment data is used for managing day-to-day operations and also as historical data that can be
used to help make cost-effective "replace or repair" decisions. The data can also be used to
develop additional management information, such as building equipment downtime failure code
hierarchies for use in maintenance management metrics.

C. Resources
The CMMS may include a separate module to track labor resources. This module typically includes
records for all maintenance personnel, including their craft or trade categories, such as mechanic,
electrician, or plumber. Additionally, this module may include labor rates in order to capture and
track true labor costs against any asset or piece of equipment. Some CMMS will allow
maintenance managers to also track skill levels and qualifications for each resource to help in
planning and scheduling work. Grouping labor categories into common associations can help a
manager assign work to particular shop rather than an individual.

D. Safety Plans
With the emphasis placed on safety throughout Government and industry, a capability for safety
plans (/design-objectives/secure-safe/occupant-safety-health)/planning may be included in a
CMMS. The following capabilities should be available:

Manual or automatic safety plan numbering.

Building safety plans for special work.
Tracking hazards for multiple equipment and locations.
Associating multiple precautions to a hazard.
Tracking hazardous materials for multiple equipment and locations.
Ability to reference hazards and precautions once they are entered into the system.
Tracking ratings for health, flammability, reactively, contact, and Material Safety Data Sheets
for hazardous materials.
Defining lock-out/tag-out procedures.
Defining tag identifications for specific equipment and locations.
Defining safety plans for multiple equipment or locations.
Viewing and linking documents.

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Associating safety plans to job plans, preventative maintenance masters, and work orders.
Ability to print safety plans automatically on work orders.
Allowing tag-out procedures to be associated to hazards or directly to locations, equipment,
and safety plans or work orders.

E. Inventory Control
An inventory control module may be included to allow an operator to track inventory movement,
such as items being moved in or out of inventory or from one location to another. Stocked, non-
stocked, and special order items could be tracked. The module should also have the capability for
tracking item vendors, location of items, item cost information, and the substitute or alternate
items that can be used if necessary. Some CMMS recommend and provide the ability to track tools
and provide basic tool-room management features as part of the inventory module. This feature
allows work planners to see what tools are in stock and assign tools to various work categories to
reduce research effort by mechanics and technicians working in the field.

F. Work Request
A work request module should be an integral part of a CMMS. The module can provide the
capability for a requestor to input the request, such as a trouble call, or it can be entered by the
maintenance organization's work control. The data entry screen should be designed to need only
minimal data entry; a requester should be able to enter minimal data, and work control can enter
additional information as required. Data should be entered once, and pop-up tables in the system
should eliminate the need to memorize codes. The work order number can be assigned manually
or automatically.

G. Work Order Tracking

A CMMS must include work order tracking which is the heart of a work order system. Again, the
data should require entry only once, and pop-up tables should eliminate the need to memorize
codes. The tracking system should provide instant access to all of the information needed for
detailed planning and scheduling, including work plan operations, labor, materials, tools, costs,
equipment, blueprints, related documents, and failure analysis. Of course, this is dependent on
how many modules are installed and how much information has been entered in the system. The
manager must evaluate data requirements and the practicality of adding modules.

H. Work Management
A work management module may be a part of the CMMS. The module could provide the capability
that would let a planner specify which labor personnel to apply to specific work orders and when.
The module permits planning and dispatching.

Planning—In planning, labor assignments would be planned for future shifts. Each person's
calendar availability would be considered when the assignments are made. The assignments
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would be created sequentially over the shift, filling each person's daily schedule with priority
work for the craft. It could even split larger jobs over multiple shifts automatically.

Dispatching—In dispatching, labor assignments would be carried out as soon as possible.

This system could begin tracking labor time from the instant the assignment is made. The
system operator could interrupt work already in progress to reassign labor resources to more
crucial work.

I. Quick Reporting
The CMMS could provide a rapid and easy means for opening, reporting on, and closing work
orders, and reporting work on small jobs after-the-fact. Labor, materials, failure codes, completion
date, and downtime could all be reported.

J. Preventive Maintenance
The following capabilities may be provided in a CMMS to manage a Preventive Maintenance (PM)
program:

Supporting multiple criteria for generating PM work orders. If a PM master has both time-
based and meter-based frequency information, the program should use whichever becomes
due first, and then update the other.
Generating time-based PM work orders based upon last generation or last completion date.
Next due date and job plans should be displayed.
Permitting and tracking PM extensions with adjustments to next due date.
Triggering meter-based PM by two separate meters.
Printing sequence job plans when wanted.
Creating a PM against an item so new parts have PM automatically generated on purchase.
Specifying the number of days ahead to generate work orders from PM masters that may
not yet have met their frequency criteria.
Consolidating weekly, monthly, and quarterly job plans on a single master.
Assigning sequence numbers to job plans to tell the system which job plan to use when a
PM work order is generated from a PM master.
Permitting overriding of frequency criteria in order to generate PM work orders whenever
plant conditions require.
Routing PM with multiple equipment or locations.
Generating work orders in batch or individually for only the equipment specified.
Capability to be used with the system scheduler to forecast resources and budgets.

K. Utilities
A utilities module that contains detailed information on utilities consumption, distribution, use,
metering, allocation to users, and cost may be included. It could include modeling capability and
linkage to utility control systems.

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L. Facility/Equipment History
A history module that would contain the maintenance histories of the facilities and equipment may
be included. It would contain summaries of PM, repairs, rehabilitation, modifications, additions,
construction, and other work affecting the configuration or condition of the items. It would include
completed and canceled work orders. The maintenance history records can be used to support
proactive maintenance techniques such as root-cause failure analysis (/resources/reliability-
centered-maintenance-rcm) and reliability engineering (http://crr.umd.edu/).

M. Purchasing
A mature CMMS may also include a purchasing module to initiate the requisition of material
against a work order and track the delivery and cost data of the material when it arrives. This
capability will allow the maintenance manager improved visibility of matters that can impact work
planning and efficiency. Procuring required material outside the CMMS can often leave information
gaps that can inhibit the effectiveness of work execution and result in redundant parts orderings
and non-standard procurement practices. The purchasing module may include many functions,
such as a vendor master catalog, invoicing, purchase orders, receiving, and even request for
quotations.

N. Facilities Maintenance Contracts

A CMMS may contain a contracts module that includes information on maintenance contracts.
With other database files, it provides a picture of each contractor's past performance, current
loading, and planned work. It could include information on specifications, Government furnished
property, quality assurance, payment processing, delivery orders issued, schedules, and related
matters. It could cover both contracts for facilities maintenance and support services.

O. Key Performance Indicators (KPI)/Metrics

The CMMS can be utilized to accumulate the data for KPIs (/resources/reliability-centered-
maintenance-rcm) for use in evaluating the organization's maintenance program. The
maintenance management organization must select the metrics to utilize in establishing their
goals and in measuring progress in meeting those goals. The importance of Selecting the Right
Key Performance Indicators (http://www.maintenancetechnology.com/2005/04/selecting-the-
right-key-performance-indicators/) cannot be overstated. The KPIs must be based on data that
can be obtained and provide meaningful information that will be utilized in managing the
organization.

P. Specialized Capabilities And Features

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Some CMMS providers have also developed specialized capabilities and features for particular
business sectors, functions, or requirements. Maintenance managers today can use their CMMS
to track transportation and fleet inventory, including maintenance history, mileages, lease terms,
rates, and accounting data. Other managers are using their CMMS to track deployed assets, such
as computers and other IT equipment. Through their CMMS, they track changes, additions, and
movement of equipment, including software inventory on computers, tablets, and smart phones.
When selecting a CMMS; consider the full scope of asset management options, with a focus on
consolidated IT solutions.

APPLICATION
A CMMS can be used to manage simple or complex facilities, from a single building to a complete
campus. A CMMS can also be used to manage the maintenance program for a grouping of
equipment such as a fleet of vehicles. The systems are very versatile, as most are in modular form
for various maintenance functions and can be customized to fit the particular application.
Whatever system or set of modules are selected for use, careful consideration needs to be given to
functional requirements and a sound deployment plan. The CMMS must meet the needs,
constraints, and opportunities of the business and be implemented in a way that users will
welcome the technology and have a vision for the benefits it brings. Proper configuration, testing,
and training cannot be over emphasized when bringing a new CMMS or upgrading an existing
system to an organization.

LESSONS LEARNED
Before procuring and implementing a CMMS, it's critical to determine how the system is to be an
asset and a usable tool in the management of an organization's day-to-day maintenance and
operations.

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS (DO'S)

1. Understand the other systems used by your organization with which the CMMS will have to
interface, such as financial and geospatial systems, and ensure that this interface can be
easily managed. Users and managers of these systems, including the IT group, should be
involved in developing the CMMS.

2. When considering a new system, make sure that the data from the existing system can be
easily and accurately transferred.

3. Look for full support from the vendor during installation and testing. Ensure that this includes
ample training of the organization's staff in both operating the system and how to maximize
the benefit of the information within the system. The vendor should impart a clear
understanding of what the system can and cannot do, as well as annual maintenance and
upgrade costs.

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POTENTIAL PITFALLS (DON'TS)

1. Do not go into the selection of a system without a clear definition of requirements: What you
expect it to do and how it is to meet your specialized needs. Also, have a clear understanding
of what metrics you want your CMMS to produce and what the work process is for your
organization. You may want to bring in outside professional guidance experienced in CMMS
but not associated with any particular vendor or system.

2. Do not try to develop a CMMS in-house. You will spend an inordinate amount of time and
money designing a system that is likely already available on the market. There are many
vendors of good off-the-shelf systems that have the advantage of years in developing and
improving systems for other similar clients.

3. Do not make your CMMS your primary payroll and accounting system. Remember that it is a
work management system that requires data relating to time and costs (thus interfacing
with your financial systems) but it should not be the system that employees rely on to get
paid, otherwise it will get tied up every two weeks with payroll time entry.

4. Do not get locked into a structure for which it is difficult to enter data or that lacks the
necessary flexibility to be upgraded or modified. Consider who will be entering the data and
their computer skills. The CMMS should have the flexibility to accept data from multiple
sources and media, and ease of data entry will improve its accuracy and the resulting output.
Also, the system should be flexible enough to allow the transfer of data during the design
and construction phases of a project, e.g. Construction Operations Building information
exchange (COBie).

5. If you are considering replacing your existing system, do not get locked to "lost costs." Don't
fall for the logic that what you have now is not doing the job but you have too much time and
money invested in it to change. Consider only the time and cost to correct your existing
system to meet your needs versus what a new system would cost.

6. Do not limit yourself to looking at only one system early in the selection process. Develop a
short list and "road test" each product. Establish rating criteria and score the actual
performance of each candidate.

7. Do not be the Beta test. Look for systems that have a proven track record with agencies
similar to yours. Avoid unneeded complexity.

Failure of CMMS implementations is a continuing problem voiced by industry experts, and

avoiding the pitfalls in decision-making about implementing or modifying CMMS in a maintenance
organization means research must be a high priority. Conduct a thorough management study of
the system to evaluate how it would be used in your organization and to determine the
costs/benefits. Not all maintenance organizations require the use of a complete set of CMMS
modules. Those that have implemented CMMS programs without adequate study typically fail to
use the capabilities incorporated in the software and may eventually view the program as a failure.

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CMMS would benefit significantly from a standardized asset identification system, in which each
piece of equipment or building component is given an identification number common to all
facilities throughout an organization. The General Services Administration (GSA) has such a
system called the Government Asset Identification System. It uses National CAD Standards
acronyms to identify assets and cross references CAD acronyms with Omniclass. If Government
agencies adopt National CAD and Omniclass standards to identify their assets, they will expect to
reduce costs, improve information for executive decisions, increase operational efficiency, and
integrate facility management with new and existing technologies.

EMERGING ISSUES
The most notable emerging issue is the implementation of Building Information Modeling (BIM).
BIM (/building-information-modeling-bim) is an enabler that vastly improves the quality of
information available to all facility tools. Information collected during design and construction can
and should be used to commission facilities and validate performance. That model information
can then be used to ensure the facility continues to perform as intended. A BIM can support all the
applications identified earlier in this article. The National BIM Standard-United States™
(https://www.nationalbimstandard.org/) provides the open formats which allow information to be
captured and used by most CMMS tools. In fact, seeking out products that do support these open
standards can minimize data lock with any specific vendor.

MAJOR RESOURCES
RESOURCE PAGE
Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) (/resources/reliability-centered-maintenance-rcm)

The Internet provides a wealth of information for use in making CMMS implementation decisions.
One site offering this type of information is reliabilityweb.com (http://reliabilityweb.com/). This
online resource is designed to provide the CMMS end user community with information, resources
and education relating to preplanning purchases and making effective use of computerized
maintenance management systems.

In evaluating the acquisition of a CMMS or adding to or replacing an existing CMMS an ROI should
be performed to obtain data to justify the acquisition. An ROI calculator to determine an
organizations potential savings from an improved management of their maintenance program is
available at the following locations:

APPA Maintenance and Operation Standards (http://www.appa.org/)

Business Industrial Network's CMMS ROI calculator (http://bin95.com/cmms-roi-
calculator.htm)
FEMP Operations and Maintenance Best Practices Guide (/ffc/doe/criteria/femp-operations-
maintenance-best-practices) by the Department of Energy (DOE)—Chapter 4: Computerized
Maintenance Management System
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Reliability-Centered Maintenance Guide (RCM) Guide (/ffc/nasa/guides-handbooks/rcm-

guide) by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The following provide links to some company web sites that offer CMMS software. There are
many others that can be found on the Internet with a "CMMS" search.

AFE: Association for Facilities Engineering (http://www.afe.org/)

International Facility Management Association (IFMA) (http://www.ifma.org/)
SAE International (http://www.sae.org)
The Society for Maintenance & Reliability Professionals (SMRP) (http://www.smrp.org/)

The National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) hosts the Facilities Maintenance and Operations
Committee (FMOC) (http://www.nibs.org/?page=fmoc). An FMOC presentation describes the
Government Asset Identification System.

Topics: Operations & Maintenance (O&M) (/wbdg-taxonomy/topics/operations-maintenance-om)

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