Equipment Maintenance Software

Equipment management software tracks an organization’s mechanical equipment, ensuring that upkeep and repairs are done on schedule and on budget.

Maintenance professionals constantly strive to reduce costs while increasing machine availability. Software helps organizations drive toward this goal by optimizing the preventive maintenance and work order process, as well as offering a way to break down historical data to uncover operational trends.

But with hundreds of products on the market, it can be a tall order to identify which ones meet your company’s needs. With that in mind, we’ve written this buyer’s guide to support managers in assessing their options as they navigate the landscape.

Here are the topics we'll cover:

• What Is Equipment Maintenance Software?
• What Type of Buyer Are You?
• Market Trends to Understand

What Is Equipment Maintenance Software

Preventive maintenance is crucial to the success of any organization. Offline equipment produces nothing, slows project completion and can even result in a complete operational shutdown. Even worse, equipment malfunctions can be dangerous, leading to time-wasting (at best) or harmful (at worst) accidents.

Equipment tracking software is designed to optimize asset performance, ensuring that preventive tasks happens on schedule and that work orders are handled with maximum efficiency. Critical functions include:

• Asset tracking—i.e., identifying when the equipment was purchased, its expected lifetime, warranty information, costs, depreciation and more
• Equipment tracking—maintaining detailed records, including service history, contracts, part and model numbers etc.
• Labor resource management—identifying labor resources needed/used to perform certain tasks, including qualifications, time and labor rates
• Managing inventory—simplifying ordering and ensuring that necessary parts are always in stock
• Managing work orders—ensuring that unscheduled maintenance occurs quickly and easily

More advanced maintenance management products like Bigfoot CMMS, Sprocket CMMS, eMaint X3 and Maintenance Connection may have a predictive maintenance feature, as well. This application predicts, based on past errors and physical symptoms (e.g., noise, vibration, temperature, corrosion, pressure) that a malfunction may be about to occur and alerts the user to the potential problem. This feature actually saved one company a million dollars in one day. Though most results aren’t quite this dramatic, almost all users can attest that properly implemented equipment and machine maintenance software will improve asset performance, reduce costs and extend the lifetime of equipment.

Equipment maintenance tracking software are commonly used for fleets of vehicles (e.g., in the transportation, agriculture, landscaping and field service industries), as well as in manufacturing sites with heavy factory equipment.

Common Features of Equipment Maintenance Software

Equipment maintenance software includes features designed to keep assets performing at peak capacity for as long as possible. These features include:

What Type of Buyer Are You?

Most buyers fall into one of the following categories:

Full-suite buyers. These buyers want seamless integration across systems. For example, a cable company may want a system that allows them to send the same information between their equipment management, field service, helpdesk and accounting departments. These buyers will want an enterprise asset management (EAM) system that simultaneously fills all these needs without re-entry or corruption of data. Products to consider include Infor EAM, Axxerion and Proteus.

Best-of-breed buyers. These buyers generally have more specific needs and want deeper functionality rather than full integration. A specialist will likely deliver a better solution than an EAM product in this instance. Consider collectiveFleet or Maintenance Connection.

Small business software buyers. Small business buyers usually go for products that are easy to use and implement and have lower up-front costs. They’ll usually find their answer in cloud-based solutions that are less robust but still address all their primary needs. Web Work by Tero Counseling and TMT Fleet Maintenance provide solutions that are high quality without breaking the bank.

Market Trends to Understand

Mobile applications. Buyers working with fleets of vehicles will want to pay special attention to this one. Mobile apps can add value to a solution, since they enable users in the field to access orders, generate new work orders, track labor and inventory use and perform any number of other important tasks, all from their mobile device. It’s becoming more common for floor managers in a factory setting to use tablet devices in this way, too.

Software as a Service (SaaS). Web-based software is becoming more popular. Especially given the growth of the mobile market, maintenance supervisors are beginning to appreciate the ease of use that comes with web-based systems, allowing them to be accessed from anywhere and requiring very little in the way of installation.