Created: 2003.03.01
A hunt for a CMMS software system that is easy to start to use, easy to learn, modern and can grow as my company grows and doesn't cost several million dollars to get setup and running like a SAP system.
I've been a business owner for many years. I've built and sold a few companies and (so far) have never gone bankrupt. Recently I have been researching CMMS software products to pick the best one for my current and future needs. I dismissed most on several grounds - the UI is so badly outdated as to be hard to learn and inefficient to use. There are several very low cost web based ones, but I found them to be too simplistic. My track record is starting a small company, growing it then selling it - so I don't want to be stuck with a simplistic system that won't grow with my needs.
But I found what I was looking for! Maintenance Connection software. Is it perfect? no the biggest problem is it doesn't work on mobile devices, it needs an add-on. But it does work well on large screen and none of the competitors have offline mobile either.
Updated link: Maintenance Connection AND offline mobile!
One that does what I need today
One that has room to grow for what I need tomorrow
One that can still work for me when I'm 10 or ideally 100x's the size I am now.
It has to be accessible
It has to have flexibility
It has to be able to remove the features that would be in the way for my staff
It need to be secure
It needs to have preventative maintenance automated
It needs to have options to grow to predictive maintenance
It needs to be easy to use for my work force
It needs to keep track of my assets
It needs to keep track of my inventory
It needs to keep track of my inventory even when it rotates through different assets
It needs to let me restrict what each person can see and do
It needs to let me control my data (backups included) so that my data remains my data and not the property of the CMMS SaaS provider.
I'd like to add the demands of a true offline mobile, but there are none out there today that offer this, so that will be a topic for the future when one or more CMMS software providers offer offline mobile access to my work orders, assets and Inventory.