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CMMS VS EAM:
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE? PART 1 Dave Bertolini and Anders Lif*
Computerised maintenance management systems (CMMS) and enterprise asset management (EAM) applications can both be used in the industrial maintenance space. One might say that the relationship between the two is rather like that between a square and a rectangle - every EAM application can be used as a CMMS, but not every CMMS can be used as, or has the broad functionality of, an EAM application.
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CMMS is essentially about managing the maintenance work necessary to sustain an asset, whereas EAM has more to do with managing the asset over its lifecycle to minimise cost and risk while maximising return. But how exactly do CMMS applications and EAM applications provide value? How do you know if your company ought to implement one versus the other?
CMMS A CMMS may be thought of as a tool that allows us to communicate about maintenance activities in the same way, using the same words, every time. It provides documentation of that communication through work orders so essential maintenance activities don’t get forgotten. CMMSs are in fact designed to do a lot of other things for us, such as collecting material and labour costs and serving as a repository for all of our maintenance information. There are definite problems that a CMMS can solve. Without a work order process that is used for every job, we have no documentation of what our most problematic pieces of equipment are. But once a company implements a CMMS and takes on the attitude
20 WHAT'S NEW IN PROCESS TECHNOLOGY - MAY 2015
that ‘the work order is king, and nothing happens without a work order’, that problem is solved. Complete visibility into what work is being performed on which pieces of equipment can help us achieve things like preventive maintenance (PM) and predictive maintenance (PdM), and can even help with repair-or-replace decisions as problems become more recurrent and expensive to solve. But technicians can be resistant to the idea of recording any and all work in the CMMS. Why? Often, it is because they think the CMMS is being used to monitor their activities and ensure they are doing their jobs. A better way to think about the CMMS and work orders is that it is a way to prove maintenance value to the organisation. In effect, any time maintenance is doing work outside of the work order system, regardless of whether you are using CMMS or EAM, you are doing work for free. Every maintenance organisation feels they are understaffed, but few are able to accurately document what their true workload is. If they could, it would help them identify the appropriate staffing level. Documenting and managing work is one way to look at CMMS. Documenting and managing equipment is another.
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