Companies seeking to automate and coordinate their facility and maintenance activities should adopt CMMS software. It’s a tool used primarily by larger enterprises with sophisticated maintenance processes, but this isn’t always the case. CMMS software for small businesses is on the rise.

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Here’s a rundown of what we’ll cover regarding CMMS considerations for small businesses:

• Why Should Small Businesses Invest in CMMS?
• Primary Benefits
• Key Features
• Overcome Business Challenges
• Best CMMS Software for Small Businesses
  • Maintenance Connection
  • ManagerPlus
  • MicroMain
  • EZOfficeInventory
  • MPulse
• Final Thoughts

Why Should Small Businesses Invest in CMMS?

CMMS solutions are feature-rich, with fundamental to complicated capabilities tailorable to your organization’s needs. CMMS can give small businesses the tools they need for tracking maintenance, scheduling preventive maintenance, inventory management, reporting, asset tracking and purchasing, among other things.

Thanks to its extensive feature set and often a-la-carte pricing, a CMMS may be a game-changer for small firms without breaking the bank.

Primary Benefits

CMMS systems offer a plethora of benefits for organizations of all sizes. Here are some of the main advantages of deploying a CMMS for your business.

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1. Consolidate Maintenance Management Information

Data from planned and predictive maintenance is multi-dimensional. You can display everything in a single 2D spreadsheet. You must update it with new information. CMMS software eliminates this problem by storing all critical data in one location.

2. Eliminate Human Errors

It’s all too simple for mistakes to seep into a spreadsheet for maintenance management. A simple copy-paste error or a missing bracket can alter your entire maintenance schedule. Errors can go undetected for months, if not years. CMMS software protects formulae and calculations from user error.

3. Automate Notifications and Work Order Reminders

Even the most well-designed spreadsheets can’t send a work order reminder. One of the most significant advantages of CMMS software is the ease of managing processes. Manufacturer guidelines and prior maintenance dates can automatically schedule predictive maintenance tasks. Log the completion of a task instantly, and your planned maintenance records are updated.

4. Compile Audit Histories

Maintenance audits become more accessible with CMMS software. While storing audit data in spreadsheets is simple, extracting pertinent information from various files at audit time is a time-consuming manual effort. CMMS systems keep a digital paper trail of every activity, including when it occurred and who took it. The history of preventive and planned maintenance is entirely transparent.

5. Leverage Reporting and Analytics

Other issues with maintenance management spreadsheets include poor analytics and reporting. A knowledgeable user can develop bespoke reports, but this takes effort to set up and maintain. The most significant indicators and KPIs are known to CMMS vendors. Overdue work orders and predictive maintenance projections, for example, can be generated instantly.

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6. Real-time Information

As a manager, you must have an accurate picture of your business. When you manually enter data into several spreadsheet files, you increase the time to carry out an action and report it. You won’t notice urgent tasks and emergencies until the damage is done.

7. Cloud-based Software

Many CMMS software solutions are cloud-based, which means we can access them through a vendor’s server and do all maintenance and upgrades remotely. There is no need for additional security software or in-house system maintenance. Maintenance and upgrades become simplified and cost-effective with cloud-based solutions.

8. Mobile Access and Portability

Mobile device access is one of the most tempting aspects of CMMS. It allows maintenance professionals to place work orders, check inventory levels, order parts and generate reports while in the field. The ability to view a CMMS dashboard from any device with an internet connection saves time because it eliminates the need to rely on office computers to execute these tasks.

9. CMMS Support

The CMMS is only as good as how it is deployed and used. You can enter all key data about inventories, assets, users and preventative maintenance configuration during deployment. For deployment, CMMS vendors offer clients the option of in-house audits or remote and telephone tech assistance.

In addition to these features, many CMMS providers supply several onboarding resources to help users get the most out of their systems over time. Online manuals, videos, email, chat, webinar recordings and telephone support are all available.

10. User Access Capabilities

Users can be assigned varying levels of system access depending on security, role descriptions or other factors with CMMS. Maintenance managers can give full access to the system, whereas maintenance technicians only get access to certain parts.

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Key Features

If you’re looking for CMMS software for your small business, a brilliant suggestion is to look at all of the features that each system offers and make sure that the one you choose has the tools that best suit your company’s needs.

Several low-cost CMMS solutions provide the capabilities small and mid-sized businesses require to run an efficient and effective maintenance management program. So knowing what to look for is helpful.

Here are the top CMMS features for small businesses that we recommend.

Work Order Management

Work order management software can help you streamline all of your maintenance procedures and reduce work order response and resolution times. Work order management schedules work orders and automatically assigns them to relevant workers. This saves employees time and effort so they can focus on other useful operations.

Since small businesses are short on staff, work order management allows each person to stay updated on all maintenance tasks avoiding constant back and forth to confirm minute details or constantly making trips back to the office to upload data.

Preventive Maintenance Management

With preventative maintenance software, you can extend the life of your assets and avoid future problems. During preventive maintenance, the team checks assets and equipment regularly to avoid sudden breakdowns and mechanical failures.

Better equipment performance leads to more productivity and faster operations, in turn generating more revenue for the business. Small businesses follow a tight budget as resources and money are in limited supply. Preventive maintenance reduces unnecessary repair costs and equipment downtime.

Parts Inventory Management

Maintenance inventory management software can help you keep track of current inventory numbers, ensure you have the proper parts on hand when you need them and avoid overspending.

With effective inventory management software, a small business can have the right quantity of products on hand and avoid running out or having funds tied up in extra stock. They can ensure products are sold in time to reduce spoilage or obsolescence. Inventory management will also help small businesses reduce expenses from extra warehouse space.

Equipment Maintenance Management

Equipment maintenance keeps a business’s equipment in reliable working order. It may include routine upkeep as well as corrective repair work. Equipment maintenance management leads to high-performing equipment, fewer breakdowns and lower repair costs.

With equipment maintenance software, you can save all your asset and equipment data in one place. Store information like purchase costs, warranties, manuals, maintenance work and other information in this database.

Custom Reports and Analytics

Create reports aligned with your company’s key performance indicators (KPIs) and use them to make data-driven staffing, budgeting and workflow choices.

Reports and insights offer a complete overview of the business. A small business can focus its purchases and operations based on this data.

These are some of the basic and most common features that CMMS systems have. Check out our full list of CMMS features and functionality to get a deeper idea.

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Overcome Business Challenges

You can address the top three difficulties most small firms experience with a contemporary CMMS that automates operations like work orders, scheduling and financial management.

Problem #1: Time

Since time is money, streamlining daily duties for your maintenance staff has a beneficial influence on the bottom line. A CMMS can boost efficiency for small companies in a couple of ways:

Reducing data-entry time with customizable fields

In terms of the user interface, maintenance software has come a long way. Many systems now allow users to customize displays and fields, saving time and effort when browsing the screen or manually entering data.

Assigning work more efficiently with mobile applications

Maintenance staff must walk or drive between a specific asset and the file cabinet or calendar to complete a job using manual methods. Machines occasionally fail without warning. The system can generate an emergency work order in this circumstance. Management can assign a work order to the technician nearest to the asset with mobile access to a CMMS, fixing the problem swiftly and decreasing downtime.

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Problem #2: Money

Small enterprises have limited budgets. CMMS suppliers are aware of this and strive to develop cost-effective systems that provide long-term value.

Select a cloud-based solution

Traditional maintenance software can take months to set up and often come with features that the client never utilizes. Businesses also need to purchase the servers required to operate the software and engage IT personnel to handle any technical issues that arise.

Cloud-based systems offer more flexibility in terms of monetary investment. They do not require major hardware installations, nor do they need high upfront payments. Cloud-based CMMS mostly come with free trials, subscription-based plans or pay-per-user plans.

Use reports to minimize labor costs and downtime

The creation of historical data reports is time-consuming and difficult using manual approaches. A CMMS automates reporting, making it easy and quick.

Easily manipulate the system’s historical repair data to uncover trends, which can save you the money you didn’t realize you were wasting.

Most systems have a variety of prebuilt report forms, such as completion rates for work orders or maintenance costs by department or asset. Many CMMS solutions allow users to plan reports and create them automatically every week, keeping managers informed of emerging patterns.

Problem #3: Low Employee Productivity

The third issue that small enterprises face is employee management. Small businesses, in particular, must trust their employees; at this scale, one bad apple may wreak havoc on the entire bunch. Employee management software helps you equip your staff with the know-how to perform high-quality maintenance.

Increasing accountability

A maintenance manager may have opinions about how each technician works, but it isn’t easy to know for sure without concrete evidence.

A CMMS allows users to create profiles for each technician and allocate tasks to personnel when issuing work orders.

Increasing awareness

When a manager retrieves information about an asset, they may see who is working on it now or has previously worked on it. Managers can develop reports showing how quickly and effectively each person works by combining this functionality with reporting.

A CMMS gives maintenance managers a certain level of awareness that allows them to stay up to date with asset information and make informed decisions.

Best CMMS Software for Small Businesses

According to our analysts, here are the top 5 CMMS software for small businesses.

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Maintenance Connection

Maintenance Connection is an operating system ideal for organizations of all sizes, available in web-hosted and self-hosted versions. It helps organizations extend asset life spans, manage maintenance tasks, assign asset hierarchies, reduce asset downtime, improve productivity and boost ROI. Its core capabilities include work order management, asset management, preventive maintenance, inventory management, predictive maintenance, calibration management and reporting.

Top Benefits

• Extend Asset Life Span: Asset tracking, condition monitoring, predictive/preventive maintenance and other features assist in keeping assets performing at their best for the duration of their useful lives.
• Manage Maintenance: Preventive/predictive maintenance (PM) planning is made easier with calendar-based maintenance scheduling.
• Assign Hierarchies to Assets: Assign assets to a custom hierarchy so that technicians may prioritize emergency repairs if, for example, extreme weather causes numerous assets to be damaged.
• Reduce Asset Downtime and Failure: PM plans help reduce asset downtime by increasing asset awareness and reducing wear and tear.
• Improve Productivity: Boost organizational and labor pool productivity using work order management.

Primary Features

• Calibration Management: Calibrate instruments that perform delicate tasks such as weighing, measuring and detecting pressure levels on a regular basis to ensure their accuracy.
• Reporting: Gain insight into operations by leveraging statistical reports with 150 prebuilt designs and a variety of customizable formats.
• Work Order Management: If there is a backlog of work, administrators can assign work orders to individual technicians and schedule them for specific dates.
• Asset Management: Arrange profiles for easy searching and cataloging based on hierarchy, location, operational status and other criteria.
• Preventive/Predictive Maintenance: To schedule and perform maintenance tasks, create both preventive and predictive maintenance plans.

Limitations

• Doesn’t support dispatch management.
• Provides limited options for creating ad-hoc or custom reports.
• Steep learning curve — for example, printing a task list in a readable format can be difficult.

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ManagerPlus

ManagerPlus is an asset and maintenance management solution that organizes, schedules, tracks and manages the maintenance of physical assets such as vehicles, buildings, equipment, machinery and components for a company. It offers enterprises of any size user-friendly, cloud-hosted maintenance scheduling, inventory management, work order management and more.

Top Benefits

• Data-rich Work Orders: Get work orders with a lot of data covering everything you need to do a job.
• Smarter Business Management: Perform business analytics and intelligence functions using data obtained from work orders, inventory management, procurement and other sources.
• Proactive and Preventive Maintenance: Prioritize, assign, plan and manage a range of work order types to increase team efficiency and streamline the maintenance process.
• Manage Facilities From the Inside Out: Use IoT and condition-based monitoring to track asset health and use that data to produce work orders when the time comes automatically.
• Anywhere Access: ManagerPlus’ server delivers enterprise-grade data protection and automatically backs up, updates and manages the platform through the cloud, allowing you to access it anywhere.

Primary Features

• Asset Management: Gather and organize asset data into a unified, accessible platform that users can access from any device.
• Maintenance Planning and Scheduling: Enables proactive, preventative and reactive maintenance operations to maximize asset usage and efficiency.
• Inspection Management: Provides inspection checklists, records past audits, schedules inspections and assigns inspection responsibilities, all of which contribute to increased asset uptime.
• Work Order Management: When tasks are due, it automatically generates work orders based on user-defined timetables. Assign these tasks to employees one at a time, or have the system distribute them automatically depending on availability or role.
• Inventory management: Keep track of inventory levels, goods counts and spare parts to be ready for any situation.

Limitations

• Needs to be more user-friendly.
• Updated version doesn’t support all functions.

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MicroMain

MicroMain’s maintenance management solutions are strong, adaptable, and intuitive, and they structure the asset maintenance process from beginning to end. It aims to reduce maintenance costs, improve asset uptime, improve safety and generally optimize an organization’s interaction with its physical assets.

Top Benefits

• Reduce Asset Downtime: Pre-set warnings, technician assignments and advanced preventative maintenance programs help keep assets up and operating.
• Boost ROA: Better asset care implies more uptime and a longer life span, resulting in higher asset returns and ROI.
• Increase Efficiency: Workforce training modules boost technicians’ abilities, and simple calendar-based plans expedite operations to improve team performance.
• Improve Asset Life Span: Make routine maintenance, condition monitoring and other asset management tools easier to use, resulting in longer asset life.
• Schedule Preventive Maintenance Plans: To find areas for improvement and get other valuable insights, create, assign, monitor and run reports on preventative maintenance plans.

Primary Features

• Work Order Management: Assign work orders, manage tool usage, define due dates and enter crucial asset-related information directly in the work order.
• Preventive Maintenance: Develop preventive maintenance plans, standardize maintenance procedures and raise equipment safety standards.
• Asset Management: Provide profiles for tracking an unlimited number of assets, grouping them together and storing detailed records, warranties, and other data.
• Inventory Management: Automatically track inventory changes based on their use in work orders and receive alerts when inventory exceeds specified levels, allowing you to replenish only when stock is low.
• Workforce Management: Performance monitoring allows you to keep track of how much time you spend on work orders and generate reports over time.

Limitations

• Not very intuitive and user-friendly.
• Complex implementation process.
• Outdated UI/UX.

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Ezofficeinventory

EZOfficeInventory is a facility and workspace management solution that specializes in IT assets, furniture, construction tools, AV equipment and other physical assets. It can be highly customized to meet specific users’ asset tracking needs.

Top Benefits

• Manage Asset Life Cycles: Keep track of assets from purchase through retirement and all points in between. To keep track of asset status, monitor purchase orders, repair histories, warranties, vendor information and overall lifetime expenses.
• Schedule Asset Use: Determine the status of assets using the calendar interface and filter data by group, location or time period to get more granular information.
• Track Costs and Budget Expenditures: Generate purchase orders and keep records of asset costs within asset profiles for quick access and searchable histories.
• Improve Asset Performance: Reduce catastrophic failures by leveraging preventive maintenance, monitoring part conditions and receiving notifications when it’s time to replace them.
• Classify Assets: To classify asset usage, develop teams, streamline projects, coordinate asset utilization, and create groups, subgroups, bundles, packages, and carts.

Primary Features

• Inventory Management: Keep track of spare parts and other inventory by location, and create alerts for when stock levels drop.
• Asset Check-In/Check-Out: To avoid scheduling conflicts, technicians can reserve assets ahead of time. They can check assets and equipment in or out to keep track of where they are and other time-sensitive information.
• Dashboard Calendars: Use a central calendar interface to communicate asset status, availability, location, and maintenance records, as well as planned events.
• Maintenance Histories: Keep track of repair history, warranties, asset usage, availability data and more to maximize asset usage.
• ID Scan: Require employees to scan their ID barcode while checking out assets to restrict access and boost security.

Limitations

• Difficult to contact technical support.
• Expensive as payment is not a flat fee but based on the number of assets.
• Problems with app permissions.

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MPulse

MPulse offers equipment, inventory and facilities tracking, along with effective preventive maintenance, scheduling and reporting. It provides features like work order management, vendor management, labor resource management and more. It’s a good fit for companies looking for easy integration and customization.

Top Benefits

• Extend Asset Life: Perform periodic repairs and manage preventative maintenance routines to help assets stay in better shape for longer periods of time, extending their life span.
• Create Maintenance Schedules: To avoid tasks sliding through the cracks, schedule recurring or one-time maintenance tasks and assign technicians to them.
• Increase ROI: Increase return on investment (ROI) by routinely maintaining assets to keep them functioning longer and reduce downtime, both of which boost profitability.
• Keep Inventory Organized: Link specific inventory products to work orders, track part consumption, manage stock levels and more to keep inventory organized.
• Get Business Insights: Create reports based on business data to acquire a better understanding of operations, make forecasts and take data-driven action.

Primary Features

• Asset Management: Track, monitor and manage physical assets and create asset profiles.
• Inventory Management: Track inventory movement between sites and spare parts, quantify materials, and manage stockroom organization. To avoid running out of supplies, send out alerts when it hits specified levels.
• Maintenance Scheduling: Use a calendar interface to schedule one-time or periodic maintenance events.
• Work Order Management: Keep track of work orders from start to finish. Assign technicians to jobs and limit access to closing orders to administrative levels.
• Mobile Access: Use on any mobile device, including iOS and Android tablets and smartphones, as long as you have an internet connection.

Limitations

• Software runs slowly sometimes.
• Reporting options need to be upgraded.
• Clumsy UI navigation.

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Final Thoughts

Small businesses are a vital part of the economy. However, they have certain limitations in maintaining a competitive edge by embracing technology adoption.

Small businesses who are hesitant to install a CMMS should remember that contemporary software can help them address some of their most pressing problems.

Look for vendors who offer cloud deployment, robust support and the ability to develop applications in phases to keep maintenance moving as you scale and introduce more features to find the ideal fit for your business.

Have you invested in CMMS software for small business? What did you look for in your solution? Tell us about your experience in the comments!