5 minute read

If you’re here, then you might already know why preventive maintenance is worthwhile. In plain terms, it’s one of the most lucrative strategies enterprises can adopt to drive costs down and maintain high scalability. If frequent unplanned downtime has been a hurdle for your maintenance team, without a doubt, you need preventive maintenance solutions. 

Having said that, choosing the best preventive maintenance software is easier said than done. There’s no dearth of options available, which means you’ll be spending a lot of time browsing if you don’t know what to prioritize. To avoid this, here’s a simple guide that outlines the essentials to keep in mind when selecting preventive maintenance platforms. 

1. Recognize Your Pain Points

You need to find maintenance software that actually solves your problems. That starts with first identifying what’s hurting your maintenance pipelines.

Review your maintenance procedures. If you lack SOPs, your maintenance team can list their daily tasks for you to follow. Ask key questions, like

  • Is the team currently scheduling preventative maintenance? If yes, how? 
  • How quickly is it solving maintenance breakdowns?
  • How frequent is the downtime?
  • Who is tracking maintenance equipment and schedules?
  • Does the team know where every asset is located? 
  • Are inventory and spare part levels being tracked? 
  • What are some of the major problems technicians frequently face? 

Once this discussion happens in detail, it becomes easier to figure out which software can exactly address your problems and provide good ROIs. 

2. Clearly Assess Your Needs

The more you understand your pain points, the more you’ll know about what features your team needs. Preventive maintenance platforms offer a range of features, from barcoding to parts management, asset management, and maintenance reporting. Keep a price range in mind, jot down your needs, and then evaluate how each software compares to these. This exercise will help you immediately filter out unnecessary solutions and go deeper into analyzing the more suitable ones. 

3. Check if the Platform Has Your Must-Have Features

This will be your first line of elimination. If certain maintenance software doesn’t have the features you’ve deemed necessary, it’s better to look elsewhere. And generally speaking, the must-have features for almost any maintenance team would include the following:

  • Work Order Management: Creating, assigning, and closing working orders, with cost tracking and hours needed
  • Parts Management: Tracking inventory and spare parts levels, linking parts to work orders, and triggering reorders
  • Scheduling: Setting calendar schedules, predictive scheduling, and condition-based triggers (usage cycles, hours, etc.)
  • Mobile Functionality: Enabling remote access through a mobile app for assigning work orders, tracking progress, and attaching media
  • Asset Database: Maintaining a centralized asset database with their manuals, identification numbers, warranty details, etc.
  • Reporting: Providing real-time reporting and dashboards of asset KPIs, usage trends, predictive maintenance data, etc.
  • Role-Based Access: Setting up access for viewing, editing, and approving tasks

4. Prioritize Maintenance and Inventory Tracking

It’s worth reiterating that, regardless of what features you need, these two will always be paramount. As your operations mature, you need a solution that can support your preventive maintenance strategies. This means choosing software that almost effortlessly tracks your maintenance operations and connects them with the parts they require. In turn, the software simplifies organizing, assigning, and tracking work orders, maintaining sufficient inventory levels, and notifying the team when parts are running low. Moreover, such software helps to have parts ready when repairing equipment, drastically reducing downtime.

5. Check for Software Integrations

Preventive maintenance systems rarely work alone. You’re ultimately investing in the software to automate operations and enhance efficiency, and that can only happen when it integrates with other tools to enable workflows. For example, the software can integrate with your IoT sensors to track real-time asset data, such as temperature or vibrations, and automatically schedule maintenance tasks if there are any fluctuations, preventing abrupt breakdowns. 

Hence, ensure that the platform you choose can integrate with your inventory systems, ERP, HR, or accounting tools, and IoT/SCADA software. If it has pre-built integrations and open APIs, these can further reduce data silos and save you operational time. 

6. Is it Easy or Difficult to Schedule Maintenance? 

Scheduling maintenance work beforehand lies at the heart of preventive maintenance. But when scheduling tasks feels like a task itself, your team cannot run at optimal efficiency. When you’re comparing vendors, check how their software schedules work. Can it easily schedule and track maintenance activities? Can maintenance schedules be easily set in a clearly understandable format? Can you view open work orders in a calendar format? These bring the ability to seamlessly schedule and track maintenance work, a must for any good software. 

The Bottom Line

At the end of the day, choosing the best preventive maintenance platform requires balancing your core internal needs with what tools have to offer. And then making sure it falls under your budget. When you can get these right, finding the best software becomes a piece of cake!