CMMS · Enterprise Software · Active

Enterprise CMMS

A maintenance-management system built around one organisation's actual workflows rather than a generic asset-management model.

Role: Architecture and delivery
Category: CMMS · Enterprise Software
Status: Active

The problem

Off-the-shelf maintenance software encodes somebody else's maintenance process. Where an organisation's workflow differs — and it always differs — the software wins and the process bends, or the software gets abandoned and work goes back to spreadsheets. Usually both, in that order.

Approach

Model the organisation's real workflow first, then build to it. Assets and work orders are the shared spine, but the routing, approvals and roles follow how maintenance is actually requested, assigned and closed in this organisation rather than how a product vendor assumes it should be.

What it does

Asset-centric operations: The asset register is the spine — work, history and responsibility all hang off it rather than living in disconnected ticket queues.
Work-order workflows: Scheduled and reactive maintenance handled through the same system, so the full picture of what was done to an asset is in one place.
Role-based processes: Requesting, assigning, performing and closing work are different jobs with different interfaces and different permissions.

The hard parts

Generic does not fit: The reason this was built rather than bought is that the workflow did not match the products available. That is a legitimate reason to build, and a bad reason to build a generic product.
Adoption is the only real metric: Maintenance software succeeds when technicians use it instead of routing around it. Every design decision is subordinate to being faster than the workaround.

Detail

Client confidentiality

I'm not naming the organisation. I describe it here as an industrial manufacturing organisation in Saudi Arabia.

The honest case for building rather than buying

Building internal software is usually the wrong answer. It is the right answer when the process is genuinely specific, the organisation intends to keep it, and the alternative is paying for a product that will be worked around. I judged that those conditions held here.

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