It’s time to abandon enterprise CMMS. Replace it with real-time IoT-class service management

In 2015, Brandon Rogers posted a Realcomm Advisory titled Administrative Costs of Work Order Management are Eroding Your Bottom Line.   Ironically, the Advisory was sponsored by a CMMS vendor.  The Advisory was pretty damning to CMMS systems.

Most organizations would find a hodgepodge of data in their work order management system that doesn’t lend any insight into how well their business is running. The daily hassle of follow through on work tickets, data entry, and closing work tickets often results in missed details, stagnant work orders and gaps in the data. In short, good, actionable data demands time and focus – an expense many organizations are willing to forego.

In our experience, 10 – 20% of building staff’s time is locked up in administering the work order management system at a property. This adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions of dollars’ worth of labor hours by managers and operations staff purely to administer the work order management systems that are supposed to provide significant efficiency savings. Brandon Rogers

Brandon says CMMS simply doesn’t work.  It’s too costly to maintain, and inevitably ends with a “hodgepodge of data” that “doesn’t lend any insight into how well their business is running”.   The costs are too high to properly maintain the database.  His suggestion is that organizations put in the effort, but do so by outsourcing the maintenance of the CMMS data itself, having the outsourcing organization maintain the workflow and close out work orders on their behalf.    It’s here that I begin to disagree with the author.

It’s time to abandon CMMS, and move to better processes, that eliminate the manual data entry and management of work orders in this 1980’s technology, and replace these processes with real-time IoT-class service management.

As facilities operators transform processes, and implement IoT, real-time service management will replace CMMS.  Don’t wait.