Capital planning and budgeting are on everyone’s minds these days and we have a secret to share with you. It will save you money and time – two precious resources in any facilities department. Or so we’ve been told by our customers.
So, what’s the big secret? When you budget and buy your CMMS, no one mentions the fact that using all the modules will not only help with budgeting, they help with short and long range capital planning. Consider this…you purchase a smart phone. It comes with a warranty, and you activate a voice plan. So it’s a phone, but what makes it smart? All the other functionality that comes with it – the apps, the music, the contacts, the calculator (don’t laugh, it’s easier than scrounging in your desk to figure out what you’ve done with yours). Basically everything. And if you don’t use any of those things, your smart phone is still just a phone.
Same with your CMMS. When you buy it and you talk about budget, you may only be getting work orders. And while helpful, that’s basically the same as using your smart phone to make a call. Hold the phone, no pun intended. You go back to your CMMS provider and say, what about all this other stuff? Where are the assets, inventory and PM’s? Where is all the data and information I need to track my whole budget? Those are the building blocks for your capital planning and budgeting. They frequently are add-on modules that weren’t included in the purchase price of your CMMS. It’s a little like finding out your smart phone doesn’t store contacts, but you can purchase contacts for an additional fee. Which is not fun, particularly if you have to go back to the old way of tracking inventory on a spreadsheet, or worse, using an inventory system that won’t integrate with your CMMS.
There’s another secret about a good CMMS.
Integration. Working with another software for ERP, EAM or BAS? Why not integrate? The most simple reason is it seems complicated. We can assure you it’s not. It’s as simple as matching ID tags and figuring out how the 1’s and 0’s like to communicate with each other. It reduces time, frees resources otherwise used for data entry and makes it easy to take all that data you have and make more sense of it. Ask your CMMS provider if they are able or willing to integrate.
So that’s it. The two big secrets to your CMMS. When budgeting for your next CMMS think about what you absolutely have to have and what you’d like to have. Only by looking for what you want to have and checking a variety of providers will you find the CMMS that unlocks the secrets for you. And then you’ll find out how easy life can get.