what does cmms stand for

Maintenance strategies have evolved pretty dramatically over the past couple of years
but the tools to manage them haven’t always kept up. Until recently, most maintenance teams relied on Excel spreadsheets, pen and paper, and legacy maintenance software to get things done.

But these approaches don’t cut it anymore—fierce competition, high production quotas and outside digital transformation influencers (like the 2020 pandemic) mean that equipment uptime is essential, and there’s more pressure on maintenance teams than ever before.

This is where CMMS systems or a digital inspection software comes in. The choice heavily depends on light or heavy industry needs.

A Computerized Maintenance Management System CMMS is a software used to schedule, organize,
track, and optimize maintenance. The term CMMS originally just referred to basic work order for better facilities management systems, but the technology has come a long way.

You can now get modern, cloud-based inspection software or CMMS solutions that helps quality control or maintenance teams to:

  • Accurately record and track all maintenance work in a central location
  • See asset history and ensure the performance of critical equipment
  • Stay on top of inventory and parts consumption
  • Keep track of maintenance schedules
  • prioritize work and stay on top of the workload
  • Use data to spot trends and make informed
    decisions
  • Connect and collaborate with the rest of your dynamic and digital dependent business nowadays.

And yes, you can still track work orders, like in the old days.

Just better and faster, and you can do it from anywhere, using your mobile phone, even without WIFI (if your hardware is robust and hefty enough, one of our specialists will guide you).

So whether you manage a construction site’s progress for a draw inspection, a mining operation or a simple home or building walk-around or anything in between, a CMMS can help you reduce unexpected and un-archived breakdowns and outages, while skyrocketing your productivity.

Isn’t it time you made your quality control or inspection tasks truly modern instead of relying on excel like it’s yet another piece of paper?

CMMS’s acronym meaning:

Computer-aided maintenance management software, which is often referred to by the abbreviation CMMS. The English equivalent is CMMS, short for a computerized maintenance management system. These are management software, primarily aimed at the heavy industry or business world, with little or no “real-time” functionality.

More recently, the name enterprise asset management or EAM has appeared in English, which has given rise trends in search engines. This translation can lead to confusion because the term “asset” has a very strong financial connotation, whereas EAM’s tools are only concerned with “physical assets”, i.e. equipment and physical assets managed by the company.

This new name reflects the desire of EAM software to go beyond maintenance services alone, by offering features of interest to the company’s general and financial departments, or by integrating business processes outside the strict framework of maintenance (regulatory management, management of plans, consumer monitoring, etc.). In practice, this approach concerns at least as much the methodology of implementation of the software in the company as the functionality of the software itself.

What is a cmms used for?

A CMMS aims primarily to assist the maintenance services of companies in their missions of upkeeping machinery, tools and light or heavy vehicles.

A maintenance service, seeks to maintain or restore a property (equipment) in a specified condition so that it is able to provide a specified service. A CMMS can also be useful in other company services, such as production or operations (to provide information on equipment status), as well as the company’s financial or general management, by providing indicators that facilitate fleet renewal decisions, for example:

How would you like to be able to inspect the quality of a heavy vehicle like a haul truck, bulldozer or perform another commercial vehicle inspection in a mobile way, while on the field of a construction site without virtually having the need to go back to your office to transcribe your digital maintenance checklist?

What is the best example of CMMS?

Examples of cmms uses come from quantitative and predictive data collected by human inspectors or IOT: Temperature fluctuations in sensors, time of last inspection of an equipment or vehicle part, number of items inside a room, the location of a person or item like safety pads or syringes in a hospital inventory room, including the date of a required preventative maintenance of an lpg tank which can prevent loss and injury. 

That is to name a few of the benefits of doing accurate field data collection with an app. Applying IoT and analytics for predictive maintenance provides the basis for digital transformation in maintenance and is consistent with the objectives of Industry 4.0. These include improvements in uptime, asset longevity, cost control, safety, and quality (or yield). But where do you start – what system is right for you. What does your roadmap look like? 

According to google: Trends in searches for the meaning of “CMMS” have been rising.

According to google: Trends in searches for the meaning of "CMMS" have been rising.

In your digital transformation process, you should ask yourself if you have to get a full-fledged EAM, CMMS, or can you get away with a free form builder or an old school Excel sheet, or maybe use a hybrid, specialized virtual inspection software like nSpek that can be molded for your needs, in your industry standards, and make a list of features you absolutely need.


Computerized meaning:
Which means in digital and electronic form, on a drive or in a database, as opposed to a paper, or other static and inanimate object.

Maintenance meaning:
Which means the way of preserving the state of a tool, vehicle or environment. Often done by specialists like mechanics who lubricate or change parts.

Management meaning:
To stay in control, to stay aware or to affect how things or people are being dealt with.

System meaning:
A group of procedures, things or principles working together and affecting in what process actions are being executed, being part of a mechanism or connected set to create a simple or complex whole.

Thus, the most common functions of these software packages are:

  • Equipment management: equipment inventory, location, dedicated information management by equipment type (production, buildings, vehicles, networks, computers);
  • The maintenance service, such as Response Request Management, allowing anyone authorized by the company to report an anomaly that needs to be considered by maintenance;
  • Management of the safety of facilities for maintenance work: consignment, centralization, security clearance, de-enactment to allow optimal locking of an installation during maintenance operations;
  • Inventory management: storage, minimum or maximum replenishment quantities, ABC analysis, pick-lists, referencing and search, alternative items, supplier catalog;
  • Purchasing management: spare parts or services (outsourcing, package or management), quote cycle, purchase request, order, receipt, and supplier return, billing;
  • Personnel management and scheduling: activities, trades, load planning, forecasting, hourly scoring;
  • Cost management and budget: labor, inventory, purchase, equipment rental, budget preparation, periodic monitoring, gap reports;
  • Key performance indicators (KPI): cockpit or dashboard for the manager (database requests for statistics, alerts);
  • Other features exist: inspection management, metrology, standards (transport, VRM), barcode, GIS link, mobile hardware (Tablette, PDA, pocket PC), remote monitoring (vibratory analysis, infrared).

Why you may need a virtual inspection software instead:

If you are part of a heavy industry like the mining sector and need to do regular mechanical or maintenance checkups of your, say caterpillar dump truck, or your Belaz 75710, then you know how necessary it is to have your field workers stay focused and on task with their inspections.

Why you shouldn’t limit yourself to a CMMS in your data collection:

So on the other hand, a CMMS is generally the only application of the company with a complete and technical description of all of the company’s equipment. This has gradually led some CMMS to offer features based on this knowledge of equipment, what we like to simply call DATA, but outside the framework of maintenance in the strict sense. Examples include monitoring certain regulations (technical vehicle control, maternal vigilance in hospitals, etc.), or the management of certain business processes related to equipment (monitoring consumption in transport, management of plans in the building, etc.). The addition of these features has led software developers and industry leaders to talk more and more about asset management software to emphasize that their applications are intended to be used far beyond the maintenance service.

For over 30 years, nSpek has grown with the leading industry players when it comes to developing custom applications, and now has a growing community of partners from different sectors, with ready to use commercial truck maintenance forms, as well as health and safety and security checklist templates which you can easily customize without the need of low-code programmers or outside assistance. Providing you full autonomy when it comes to building your own digital inspection form yet with access to our specialized technicians who can guide you from creating any heavy-duty truck preventative maintenance checklist build to construction site draw inspections for banks or simple and mobile quality control audits.

You may find it reassuring that one of services is to guide you, at our costs, because we look for partners rather than a quick sale and a short-term client. We can further answer any of your questions about:

  • condition monitoring equipment approaches
  • condition based maintenance vs predictive maintenance
  • anything about preventive maintenance software
  • how to digitize your paper forms to start

What a modern inspection platform is…

You will quickly learn that not all inspection software are SAAS – software as a service. Some are coding agencies which will program a custom solution for you which can take years, months at best. And with the current price of developers, who knows if it’ll be worth it?

It’s time to choose nSpek for any of your maintenance activity. It’s one thing to do some modernizing cmms efforts, it’s another to listen to your mobile field workers true data-collection needs:

  • Improve your asset maintenance process
  • Manage assets like a modern operation
  • Increase your asset lifecycle and duration
  • Schedule preventive inspections and get automatic reminders and smart alerts
  • Make your maintenance tasks a priority over tedious data-entry paperwork instead.