Taking Your Business to the Next Level with CMMS Software
If you are like most business owners, you are constantly thinking of ways to keep up with the rapidly changing day-to-day operations while also attempting to keep costs down.
Maintaining your assets, human and labor resources, preventative maintenance, inventory, and countless other elements of running your business can be daunting. With CMMS Software, you can centralize all these business maintenance operations into one place. CMMS Software will take your business to the next level.
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So, What is CMMS Software?
At the end of the day, one of the most important concerns you will have running your business is reliable uptime. CMMS Software uses a database to centralize maintenance information and facilitate the processes of maintenance operations. CMMS Software will organize the information in your business so that you will best be able to maintain your:
- Fleet: Keeps up with the maintenance, registration, certifications, and vehicle equipment to reduce needs for costly repairs or lapses in licensing
- Human Resources: Tracks hours, licenses, availability and can generate teams to complete tasks based on experience and certification.
- Work Orders: Keeps a record of work order numbers, types of work orders, delivery time, downtime, work order status, planned and actual costs, and associated documentation for each.
- Preventative Maintenance: Keeps up with maintenance needs and work orders to predict the need for maintenance and automate the process and increase uptime.
- Inventory: Manages your inventory across storage areas, distribution centers, and other facilities along the supply chain. Keeps track of inventory costs and automates resupply.
- Analysis Reports and Audits: Assesses trends across all business categories and generates reports suggesting needs and potential automation changes to increase uptime across all areas of your business.
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Which Industries Use CMMS Software?
CMMS Software is a rapidly growing business automation tool that is being utilized by many industries. These industries include:
Food Service: Since the Foodservice industry is tasked with the responsibility of adhering to many laws and regulations, keeping track of day-to-day operations and equipment is essential. CMMS Software will ensure equipment is running smoothly to avoid malfunctioning equipment that will result in a health inspection failure. In addition, it keeps track of employee certifications, inventory, employee hours, time off, and schedules.
Manufacturing: When it comes to manufacturing, assets are the lifeblood of the operation. CMMS Software organizes all maintenance records and needs and streamlines the work order process. This keeps equipment running smoothly and reduces downtime and costly repairs. CMMS Software increases operational efficiency to help your manufacturing business achieve its goals.
Oil and Gas: As the political environment surrounding oil and gas become more turbulent, now more than ever CMMS Software can assist in the automation of operations. Keeping the maintenance team up to date on everyday equipment needs can be the difference between hefty fines and perfect inspections. CMMS Software will also assist in keeping track of trends, inventory, and prices to keep revenue as high as possible.
Government and Local Municipalities: From infrastructure breakdowns, maintenance needs, planning committees, and community concerns, CMMS Software will organize every element of the governing process. This streamlines aid and delivers what your community may need in a more targeted and effective manner.
Education: Tracking teacher hours, student attendance, government funding, and extracurricular activities are among the many things you can use CMMS Software for in education. It can help identify trends and assist in proactive administration efforts to mitigate potential fallout from a downward trend in academic success.
Property Management: With it being a seller’s market, it is more difficult than ever for investors to obtain and maintain property. CMMS Software can identify sales trends in specific markets and position investors toward where they need to strike. It will also allow property managers to be proactive with preventative maintenance and avoid costly repairs.
This list can also expand to Energy, Automotive, Tech, News, and countless other industries.
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How Can Your Business Benefit from CMMS Software?
By this point, you are likely considering the benefits of CMMS software and already mentally considering how it might help your business specifically. While every business has different operations, here are some universal benefits to CMMS Software that will take your business to the next level:
- Increased Uptime: Asset downtime is a nightmare. When one piece of equipment stops, there is a chance the entire operation can come to a standstill. The maintenance team will be tasked to fix the equipment in a timely manner to resume operations. With an automated system that delivers proactive maintenance information daily, the maintenance team will be able to avoid costly repairs and maximize uptime.
- Inform Departments of Preventative Maintenance: CMMS Software can track downtime and asset maintenance needs. This will help the maintenance team be fully prepared to repair or replace parts that are predicted to need replacement. Since maintenance is able to predict the life span of certain parts of regularly changed components, they can avoid future downtime and save your business a significant amount of lost man-hours and repair costs.
- Inventory Management: CMMS Software will track inventory as it moves throughout the supply chain and will inform you of your businesses needs to reorder necessary supplies. This is a substantial task for human labor. This burden will be removed, and you will eliminate labor costs while also efficiently tracking trends and predicting needs.
- Communication: Communications between departments can be a hassle in any business and oftentimes correspondence can be lost, and miscommunications can occur. CMMS Software removes the ambiguity and stores communication in a database for future references. This will create a digital paper trail and allow associates within the company to reference them as the need arises.
- Reporting: Reporting is necessary for your business and is a timely endeavor. CMMS software will eliminate various elements of that operation by streamlining the entire process. Since all of the elements of your company will be intertwined into one place, the software will have accurate accounts of every aspect of the process. This will ensure complete and accurate reporting.
When it comes to your business, these features are crucial to day-to-day activities, and streamlining them and other processes will make a significant difference in what your business looks like in the future.
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Can My Company Afford CMMS Software?
Right now, you are thinking, this all sounds wonderful, but the costs involved will set your company back a pretty penny. Generally setting up a new operation like this will cost your company a fortune but what are the actual costs involved and how is it broken down?
- SaaS (Software as a Service):Since most CMMS Software is set up to be delivered as a service through a cloud-based system. The setup costs are very minimal and generally involve a monthly pay subscription rather than exorbitant setup costs and a team to maintain it.
- Pricing Models:
- Per-User Subscription: Starting at around $35 per user depending on the software company you choose is right for your business, this is a favorite for those that employ a few employees in the field. The cloud-based system allows the users to have access to the CMMS software on the road, connecting them to each other and the home office.
- Pay Per Month: This can vary depending on the size of your business and your business needs, but the costs can start as low as $50 per month to $1,000 per month depending on the CMMS Software company you choose. While the difference in those prices seems substantial, the basic package is for a company with very few employees and minimal day to do processes while the larger package is for a company that employs many people and has a greater need for automation of processes.
- Pay One Time Perpetual Licensing: This option has the greatest upfront cost involved. With prices tags that can be as low as $1500 and as high as $40,000 or greater, this option is for larger businesses that have significant customization needs and will generally be an on-premise operation as opposed to cloud-based usage.
- Additional Costs and Fees:
- Integration: Integrating CMMS software into your company requires collaboration between the software company representatives and representatives from your company. The costs are not substantial but can vary greatly based on the size of the company.
- Training: While most software companies will provide web-based CMMS Software training modules online free of charge, some will not have that option and will charge fees to train your employees. This is something that may need to be considered before your company purchases from a company.
- Support: While support is generally a part of the package, priority support teams for immediate and targeted needs may require an additional fee.
- Upkeep: Yes, your maintenance system needs maintenance. Updates, patches, and upgrades are generally included in the subscription costs but are sometimes billed as an additional fee depending on the company you work with and your needs. Perpetual Licensing buyers will generally incur a fee when any maintenance requirements arise.
- You Can’t Afford Not to:
- Reduced Maintenance Costs: With the entire process streamlined, maintenance and repair costs should drop substantially as preventative maintenance eliminates the need for costly repairs.
- Reduced Downtime: With downtime reduced, productivity will increase and there will be fewer man-hours lost.
- Reduced Man Hours: With CMMS Software in place, most processes will be streamlined, eliminating the need for human labor to be a part of every process. This can save your company a fortune in workforce alone.
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What is the Best CMMS Software for You?
Each business has its own needs and employee requirements so there is no real formula to decide which CMMS Software you should go with. This list of 8 of the top CMMS Software will help guide you in making the right choice for you.
- MaintainX: What is unique about MaintainX is that their CMMS Software provides a free option for small businesses. This option is extremely basic and doesn’t include things such as inventory tracking, preventative maintenance prediction, and other valuable process streamlining. There are 3 other tiers starting at $8.33 per user and move up to $32.50 per user and beyond to a premium package that requires your business to contact them for tailored pricing. Realistically, if your business operations are even moderately extensive and require most of what was discussed already, you will likely opt for the $32.50 option, but for a very small business, the free option is not bad.
- Limble CMMS: After a free 30-Day Trial, Limble CMMS starts at a low cost of $40 per user per month. This includes features like preventative maintenance, data importing, work requests, and much more. There are 4 packages, each one improving upon the one before it, all resulting in a system that offers AI integration for maintenance predictability needs and many custom integrations. This package is great for those seeking a relatively low-cost full-service package.
- UpKeep: UpKeep is another CMMS Software that provides your business with a free option. Along with UpKeep’s free option, it has higher-tier low-cost options providing a great deal of system automation. With 4 tiers, you can start by paying nothing for work order management, asset management, and parts inventory management. Depending on your companies needs, you can opt for the higher tiers offering inventory managing, advanced analytics, and workflow automation. On top of all of these features, another great advantage is it is almost exclusively a mobile app so your employees will be able to utilize this resource wherever they may be.
- eMaint CMMS: With over 50,000 users worldwide, eMaint CMMS is an award-winning CMMS Software. With their basic package starting at just $33 per user per month, eMaint CMMS offers a robust asset reliability platform for your business. It is highly customizable, so you have the ability to work the way you want without being constrained by the limitations of the software. Their pricing is competitive and even with the smallest package, it will not leave your business lacking in regard to the CMMS Software features previously discussed.
- Hippo CMMS: With comparable pricing and services as other CMMS Software, Hippo CMMS is known for its simplicity. The platform is user-friendly and designed primarily for ease of use. This allows your employees to acclimate to the system a little smoother than other software. It simplifies the integration process which leads to system utilization a little faster.
- Fracttal:Fracttal prides itself on its 100 percent mobile automation and ability to be used on any device anywhere. Fracttal does utilize a free option with a skeleton system for up to two users. The next higher option skyrockets to $195 per month. Unlike other CMMS Software packages from other companies, this package covers up to 5 users and grants them access to most of the software capabilities. Each package upgrade more than doubles in price but it also doubles the users and introduces more features. At first glance, the higher monthly costs looks to be substantially greater than the other software choices but with the user cap built into the tiered pricing, this option is more affordable than the others while offering the same services.
- MVP Plant: Unfortunately, their pricing is not readily available on their website. What MVP Plant has that other CMMS Software does not is its ability to be fully online and offline. This allows users to complete tasks while being out of network or away from Wi-Fi. When away from a network, it can be difficult to complete a task that requires internet access. This is completely circumvented by the offline capabilities. When the user regains internet access, their tasks will be automatically updated into the database for automation. That convenience is one of the major staples of MVP Plant.
- Dude Solutions: Dude Solutions focuses mainly on Education, Senior Living, Manufacturing, Clubs and Associations, Healthcare, and Government expertise. They do offer services to other industries but with a greater focus on these industries, they are able to provide more targeted benefits from their CMMS Software to these industries. Their prices are not listed openly on their website, which makes sense considering their focus on the specific industries. They offer suites targeted to each industry that is unique to their day-to-day operations. If your company falls under one of these categories, Dude Solutions might be the best choice if you are looking for an easy implementation process.
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What Now?
Looking at the future of your business can often be a daunting task. With the ever-changing labor market, a fluctuating economy, cost of goods increasing, and tensions with trade worldwide, it is tough to know where to look. If you are looking to stay ahead of your competition and accelerate your business into the future, CMMS Software is something you should be taking advantage of today. You cannot afford to allow your business to go one more day without these amazing automation options. Start the integration process now and watch your business evolve.