Is the term GMAO still relevant?

CMMS: Computer-aided maintenance management

Mobile applications such as Mobility Work make life easier for maintenance technicians and encourage their mobility.

With the arrival of the first computers in the industry, the first professional software for all company departments quickly saw the light of day. This is how maintenance departments adopted the first CMMS (computer-aided maintenance management) software in the 1980s. At the time, their aim was to centralize maintenance interventions andimprove spare parts inventory management. Little by little, these improved: first trees, planning modules for predictive maintenance, order management and the first data analysis modules.

Maintenance management software thus evolved a lot during the years 1990 and 2000, then experienced a slowdown from 2010: in fact, interfaces had not changed much until now, and the gap between the tools used by users in their daily lives and their professional life had become too great. CMMS were then victims of several problems, common to many solutions on the market:

Too rapid evolution of technologies

Indeed, many solutions were taken aback in the face of the speed of technological advances in the 2010s: computers, tablets, smartphones, smart glasses, etc. Technology is constantly evolving, and the development of software adapted to this technology has thus lagged behind schedule. The gap is continuing to increase.

In addition, the technology used by these software has not evolved, and it is very difficult to adapt it to offer applications that resemble the ones we like to use in our daily lives. Indeed, whether in terms of computer programming or databases, users use technologies that are 10 years old, and their migration is often complicated and difficult. Maintenance solution providers are facing a technological gap between their maintenance management software and the technology currently available.

It is also necessary to mention the poor project and development management of computer-aided maintenance management editors, who offer new versions every 3 years instead of having their maintenance software evolve very regularly. However, the arrival of SaaS mode should help some publishers to improve the upgrades of their application, if these are of course not invoiced, which is a common practice in the industry.

A sector in an impasse

It is a fact, maintenance management software generally enjoys a negative image in the industry: expensive, difficult to implement, and an added value for maintenance technicians close to 0. In 2017, this resulted in a still large number of companies preferring to use Excel maintenance management rather than a real maintenance application.

Maintenance management software publishers all offer more or less the same services, as well as more or less identical pricing. That's why we created Mobility Work. We are the first to offer a completely innovative collaborative maintenance management platform at an affordable price; why? Perhaps because we ourselves have experienced the failure to deploy maintenance management software with these publishers and the discouragement in the face of implementing the solutions that existed on the market.

Is the term CMMS still relevant?

In the era ofIndustry 4.0 and the digitalization of business thanks to telephones, tablets and connected sensors, we are in a position to ask ourselves questions about the updating of the term CMMS. Shouldn't it be renamed in favor of a term closer to the technological change that our industries are experiencing today? History has it that this term is known today by any maintenance person, and refers to maintenance software.

Maintenance occupies a central place in industrial professions. Affected like many other sectors by a phenomenon of “uberization”, the world of maintenance is evolving, whether thanks to new tools, new technologies or new modes of maintenance management.

We are convinced that the world of maintenance will change profoundly in the coming years, and we hope that Mobility Work, a next-generation maintenance management platform, will be the leader in this change.