In one line
A CMMS (computerised maintenance management system) is software that tracks your assets and organises the maintenance work done on them — work orders, preventive schedules, spare parts and history — replacing the spreadsheets, whiteboards and WhatsApp groups most teams start with.
CMMS stands for computerised maintenance management system. It's a category of software that helps teams manage the upkeep of physical assets — machines, vehicles, buildings, equipment — by keeping the work organised and the history in one place.
If you currently run maintenance on a spreadsheet, a shared inbox, or a stack of paper job cards, a CMMS is the tool built to replace all three. It answers the questions that spreadsheets can't: what needs doing this week, who's doing it, what did this asset cost us last year, and is anything about to fail?
What does a CMMS do?
Most CMMS platforms are built around a handful of core capabilities. When you're evaluating tools, these are the pillars to look for:
1. An asset register
A living record of every asset you maintain, each with its own location, make and model, documents, warranty and full service history. This is the foundation — every work order and cost ties back to an asset, so you can see the true lifetime cost of a machine and decide when to repair versus replace.
2. Work orders
The heart of a CMMS. A work order captures a job — what needs doing, on which asset, by whom, and by when — then tracks it through to completion. Good work-order management shows you a live queue of open work, who's assigned, and what's overdue, instead of jobs living in someone's head.
3. Preventive maintenance (PM)
Rather than waiting for things to break, a CMMS lets you schedule recurring maintenance — every 3 months, every 500 hours, every 10,000 miles — and auto-creates the work when it's due. This is where the real savings come from; we cover it in depth in our practical guide to preventive maintenance.
4. Spare parts & inventory
Track the parts you hold, get alerted when stock runs low, and link parts to the jobs that consume them — so a technician isn't halfway through a repair before discovering the part is out of stock.
5. Reporting & analytics
Dashboards that turn all that activity into decisions: maintenance backlog, mean time to repair (MTTR), planned-vs-reactive ratio, cost per asset, and compliance status. This is what turns a maintenance team from a cost centre into something the board can see and trust.
CMMS vs EAM vs CAFM — what's the difference?
The acronyms overlap, and vendors use them loosely. In practice:
- CMMS focuses on maintenance — work orders, PM, and keeping assets running.
- EAM (enterprise asset management) is broader: it adds the whole asset lifecycle — procurement, depreciation, and long-term capital planning — usually at enterprise scale.
- CAFM (computer-aided facilities management) leans toward space, rooms and building services rather than equipment.
For most small and mid-sized operations, "CMMS" is the right starting point — and modern platforms increasingly blur the line, covering EAM-style asset intelligence without the enterprise price tag.
Signs you need a CMMS
You've probably outgrown spreadsheets if any of these sound familiar:
- Nobody can say, with confidence, what maintenance is overdue right now.
- The same asset keeps breaking, but no one has the history to spot the pattern.
- Compliance certificates or statutory checks have lapsed because a reminder lived in one person's calendar.
- A job "done" on paper can't be proven — no photos, no timestamp, no sign-off.
- You're reactive: most of your maintenance is unplanned firefighting, not scheduled work.
What to look for when choosing a CMMS
Beyond the core features, the things that decide whether a CMMS actually gets used are usually these:
- Mobile and offline. The work happens in the field — on a rooftop, in a plant room, in a yard with no signal. If technicians can't capture work on a phone offline, adoption dies.
- Fast to set up. If it takes six months of consulting to go live, it won't. Look for guided onboarding and CSV import.
- It closes the loop. Raising a job is easy; the value is in what happens next — assignment, completion, sign-off and a report back to whoever asked. A tool that only logs work leaves the coordination to you.
- Open, not locked-in. A REST API and exportable data mean the CMMS can feed your ERP, BI and other systems — your data stays yours.
How much does a CMMS cost?
CMMS pricing usually lands in one of three shapes: per user per month (common for maintenance teams), per asset (fairer if you have many assets but few users), or a flat platform fee at the enterprise end. Entry-level tools start around a few pounds per user per month; enterprise EAM suites run into five or six figures a year once implementation is included. The honest advice: start small, prove value on one site or asset class, then expand.
Getting started
You don't need to boil the ocean. The teams that succeed with a CMMS almost always start the same way: pick one site or one class of asset, load it in, put every job through the system for a month, and let the history build itself. Once managers can see the backlog and the trends, the case for rolling it out makes itself.
If you'd like to benchmark where you are today, our free Inspection Maturity Score scores your current process in under two minutes and shows your three highest-impact moves.