Manufacturers face a lot of challenges every day. Trying to keep equipment running and minimizing downtime, managing resources, and keeping track of asset data are just some of the problems that manufacturers face on a daily basis. Along with these tasks, they have to maintain maintenance performance and reduce costs.
Even a small lapse in maintenance or asset management can lead to major disruptions—production delays, unplanned equipment failures, and costly repairs. For many facilities, juggling all of this with outdated systems like spreadsheets or paper logs just doesn’t cut it anymore.
That’s where modern maintenance technology comes in. In particular, Computerized Maintenance Management Systems, or CMMS, have become an essential tool for manufacturers looking to streamline operations and get ahead of maintenance issues before they spiral out of control. But what is CMMS in manufacturing?
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what CMMS is manufacturing and how it can improve the day-to-day and long-term performance of manufacturing operations.
CMMS Meaning In Manufacturing
In manufacturing, a CMMS is software that helps manage and track maintenance activities, ensuring equipment reliability and minimizing downtime. It centralizes information about assets, maintenance tasks, work orders, and inventory, enabling efficient planning, scheduling, and execution of maintenance operations.
At its core, a CMMS acts as the digital backbone of a maintenance department. It replaces scattered documents, whiteboards, and spreadsheets with a single platform that allows teams to operate more proactively and strategically.
Key Features of a CMMS in Manufacturing:
Work Order Management
Create, assign, prioritize, and track maintenance work orders in real-time. Technicians can see exactly what needs to be done, access asset histories, and log their work from mobile devices or desktop systems.
Preventive and Predictive Maintenance Scheduling
Instead of waiting for breakdowns, CMMS tools enable routine service tasks to be automated based on time, usage, or condition, extending equipment life and reducing surprise failures.
Asset Tracking
Keep detailed records of each asset, including service history, warranties, manuals, and location—helping make smarter decisions around repair vs. replace and overall lifecycle costs. This helps ensure asset health never threatens productivity.
Inventory and Spare Parts Management
Monitor stock levels for spare parts and tools, track usage, and set reorder thresholds to avoid stockouts that delay maintenance.
Reporting and Analytics
With access to customizable dashboards and reports, managers can identify patterns, spot inefficiencies, and justify maintenance budgets with data-driven insights.
How It Works
CMMS platforms are available as cloud-based or on-premise solutions. Cloud-based systems offer flexibility, remote access, and easy updates, while on-premise setups provide more control over maintenance data. Many modern CMMS systems also integrate with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices, allowing real-time monitoring and smarter decision-making.
By digitizing and automating maintenance processes, CMMS transforms maintenance from a reactive chore into a strategic operation that contributes directly to productivity, safety, and cost savings.
Common Maintenance Challenges in Manufacturing
1. Minimizing Equipment Downtime
One of the main challenges that most manufacturers face today that impacts an organization’s bottom line is equipment downtime. Some of the issues that this can cause include:
- Delivery of services to customers
- Lost production time
- Unexpected expenses of emergency repairs
- Missed work orders
- Incomplete work orders
- Loss of asset historical data
- Overstocked or understocked spare parts inventory
- No team collaboration
- No mobile access
CMMS software is designed to help manage all of these tasks, improving manufacturing maintenance processes, reducing costs and more, in one centralized system. Accessing and managing real-time information from a computer or mobile device increases efficiency and productivity.
Modern CMMS platforms allow maintenance teams to set up preventive maintenance schedules, respond to equipment issues faster, and keep critical systems running with minimal disruption. Alerts and automated workflows mean fewer surprises and centralized data means technicians spend less time guessing and more time fixing. All of this leads to fewer delays, lower emergency costs, and happier customers.
2. Improving Work Order Management
Not having a system in place to effectively manage can cause manufacturing organizations some of the following problems:
- Overlooked work orders
- Scheduling of workloads
- Mistakes
- Disorganization
- Duplication
- Scheduling issues
- Inventory levels
- Low stock of supplies and materials
Effective work order management within a manufacturing organization is critical to the overall production and operations of the organization. It is important to have a robust system in place for production managers, technicians, and other personnel to submit a maintenance work order easily.
Work orders contain detailed information and can track maintenance work time and expenses, capture notes, attach documentation, upload images, and can be closed out from anywhere. Using a CMMS to manage work orders and tracking can be a seamless part of your operations.
A modern CMMS eliminates guesswork by centralizing all work order activity—who’s doing what, when, and with which parts. It reduces missed jobs and duplicate efforts, ensures technicians always know what’s next, and lets teams easily update job status in real-time. With mobile access, technicians can even complete work orders on-site without returning to a workstation, speeding up the entire process.
3. Enhancing Equipment Performance with Preventive Maintenance
The main objective is to keep equipment running at peak performance. This involves the necessity of having a good preventive maintenance plan in place. With CMMS, you can build preventive maintenance schedules and assign qualified resources at your convenience, reducing the likelihood of equipment failure and disrupting business operations.
Through a calendar-based Preventive Maintenance (PM) module, users can easily view and manage all of their tasks. Managing schedules in accordance with the manufacturer’s recommendations, having access to historical records and performance, and being able to track the time spent on functions can significantly improve maintenance operations.
To ensure that tasks and checklists have been properly followed, automated approval processes can be put in place. Having an approval process in place ensures issues or missed tasks can be caught before the potential of jeopardizing the work.
CMMS is one of the most beneficial tools to help you streamline processes, take the worry out of routine tasks, and let you focus on more critical issues.
CMMS takes the complexity out of preventive maintenance by automating it. Instead of relying on memory or manual schedules, PM tasks are triggered by calendar dates, usage metrics, or conditions set by manufacturers. This consistency helps catch issues before they become major failures. Over time, access to maintenance history and performance data also helps refine schedules, identify underperforming assets, and boost overall equipment effectiveness (OEE).
4. Asset Management
Enterprise Asset Management is the process of managing, tracking, and monitoring the company’s fixed or movable assets. Manufacturers are one of the largest contributors to our economy, but they also have a lot of challenges, such as:
- Extending the life of assets
- Asset Theft
- Unexpected breakdowns
- Maintaining asset history
- Decision-making for retiring assets
- Keeping records for audits
- Keeping equipment safe
- And more…
Having a system like a CMMS to manage assets, addresses all of the above concerns and ensures that every piece of equipment is running at peak performance. With a CMMS, historical and real-time information is stored in a central system that is readily available and easily searchable. The data can be easily analyzed to identify improvements and provide the information required to make sound business decisions.
With real-time tracking and detailed asset profiles, a CMMS allows teams to make smarter, faster decisions about equipment. It supports life cycle planning, helps prevent costly breakdowns, and improves record-keeping for compliance and audits. The result? Less guesswork, better investments, and more control over physical assets.
5. Gaining Control Over Inventory
Not having control of your inventory can cost organizations a lot of money. Some of the issues that can affect your inventory management include:
- Time spent locating parts
- Shipping expenses for hard-to-find parts
- Duplication of orders
- Inventory not identified
- Managing inventory levels
- Obsolete inventory
- Overstocked inventory
- Under stocked inventory
- Manual inventory cycle counts
Every piece of equipment and every asset has its maintenance schedule. Some of these schedules may be based on run time, repairs, etc. A CMMS helps maintenance teams create preventive maintenance tasks and work orders based on the manufacturer’s or organization’s guidelines. You can easily manage all of the above functions to ensure that you can immediately repair a breakdown without incurring major expenses or prolonged business disruptions.
A CMMS gives you full visibility into inventory levels and usage trends. You can track parts used in work orders, set reorder points, and avoid both costly overstocking and disruptive stockouts. This not only saves money but also ensures your team always has the right tools and materials to complete jobs on time.
6. Reducing Operational and Maintenance Costs
The cost of equipment and facility management can run pretty high in businesses of every size, and managers or supervisors are always looking for ways to reduce costs. Even though it seems impossible to control expenses, it still has to be done. Some of the issues that cause the rise in unexpected costs may include:
- Machine failures occur without warning
- Production lines go down
- Managers chasing down parts
- Managers trying to resolve issues
- Managing employee time
All of these issues are controllable and can simply be managed through a CMMS. With extensive real-time and detailed reporting, you can access informative information to help you identify different problems with equipment, staffing spare parts, and more.
A well-implemented CMMS acts like a financial control center for maintenance. It helps identify where money is being lost—whether through inefficient repairs, excessive part orders, or underutilized labor. Detailed cost reporting allows maintenance leaders to track ROI, justify budgets, and make proactive changes that drive down total maintenance costs over time.
7. Boosting Team Mobility and Collaboration
If your team is running back and forth from your shop or other buildings to check on which tasks or work orders they have, this is prolonging the time it takes for the repair to be completed and is costing you a lot of time and money. While the desktop-based CMMS allows users to access and manage the information easily, you are still tied to a computer. When technicians have access to a mobile CMMS, they will see many benefits, including the following:
- Work Orders can be sent to the technician in the field
- Work Orders can be prioritized to accommodate emergencies in real time
- Ability to edit tasks
- Create and send additional work orders
- View current work orders
- Access checklists
- Access inventory records
- Access asset history information
- Documents, manuals, images, and more are easily accessible
- Improves communications between maintenance teams
- Improves Accuracy
- Increases efficiency
- Access from anywhere at any time
Mobile access is a game-changer in manufacturing maintenance. With a CMMS that works on smartphones and tablets, technicians don’t need to return to the office for updates—they can access everything in the field. This improves communication between teams, eliminates delays, and keeps everyone focused on fixing problems, not chasing paperwork.
8. Ensuring Regulatory Compliance
Manufacturers have a lot of regulations that they must follow. This means that you have to be able to be ready during inspections to prove compliance was adhered to and that all of the processes were followed. Failure to comply with regulations can result in severe penalties.
How can a CMMS help you be ready for these inspections? A CMMS is a powerful system that keeps businesses compliant by documenting asset maintenance tasks to prove that you have performed all of the necessary steps to be compliant. Being able to supply regulatory agencies with this information easily will help you avoid those penalties and fines.
From ISO standards to OSHA and FDA requirements, manufacturers need reliable maintenance records. A CMMS automatically logs who did what, when, and how, making compliance reporting fast and stress-free. Digital records not only help pass audits—they also protect your company in the event of legal challenges or warranty claims.
9. Data-Driven Decision Making
Decisions need to be made quickly in manufacturing—and backed by data. A CMMS offers powerful reporting and analytics features that help identify trends in asset performance, track technician productivity, and highlight recurring issues.
With this insight, maintenance managers can:
- Identify underperforming assets
- Optimize preventive maintenance plans
- Justify budget increases
- Improve technician scheduling
- Predict spare parts demand
- Know whether to call in maintenance technicians
Instead of reacting to problems, data-driven teams using a CMMS can get ahead of them—making smarter choices that support long-term efficiency and profitability.
Choosing the Best CMMS Software for Your Manufacturing Operation
Selecting the right CMMS for your manufacturing plants and facilities is a crucial decision. Every organization has its own unique workflows, assets, and operational challenges—and the system you choose should align with those needs while supporting future growth.
When evaluating CMMS solutions, here are some key things to consider:
- Ease of Use – Can your team quickly learn and adopt the platform with minimal training?
- Mobile Functionality – Does the system support technicians in the field with full access to tasks, history, and inventory?
- Customization – Can it be tailored to your specific processes, equipment, and compliance needs?
- Integration Capabilities – Will it work seamlessly with your existing systems, such as ERP or IoT platforms?
- Support and Service – Is there a responsive, knowledgeable support team to guide you through implementation and beyond?
- Transparent Pricing – Are the costs clear, scalable, and aligned with your business size and needs?
At eWorkOrders, we’ve built our CMMS platform specifically to meet the complex demands of manufacturers. Our system centralizes all your maintenance activities—work orders, asset tracking, preventive maintenance, inventory management, and compliance documentation—into one intuitive, cloud-based solution.
We offer:
- A user-friendly interface designed for fast adoption
- Comprehensive mobile access for technicians in the field
- Real-time dashboards and customizable reporting
- Scalable solutions for teams of any size or projects
- Exceptional customer support and onboarding services
Our goal is to make maintenance simpler, smarter, and more connected—so you can focus on what matters most: keeping your operations running smoothly and efficiently. We can help operations of all sizes, from small manufacturers or large-scale businesses. We’re here to help you take control of your maintenance processes and drive real results.
Summary
Maintenance management is an essential part of your manufacturing company. A maintenance management program ensures the long-term success of your maintenance operations by monitoring quality assurance, maintaining operational efficiency, and keeping assets operating at peak performance. Improving operational efficiency contributes to revenue by decreasing operating costs and improving the quality of manufactured goods.
In order to be successful, you need to invest in tools that will help improve productivity and efficiency. Investing in a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) is an essential system in helping to solve many of the problems and issues that manufacturers face today. For more information about how CMMS software can improve your bottom line, contact eWorkOrders today, get your questions answered, and get a free demo!
FAQs
What is an example of a CMMS?
An example of a CMMS is eWorkOrders, a cloud-based platform that helps organizations manage maintenance tasks, work orders, asset tracking, and preventive maintenance. It’s used across various industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, and facilities management.
Is SAP and CMMS the same thing?
No, SAP is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that includes a broad range of business functions, while a CMMS focuses specifically on maintenance management. However, some SAP modules can perform maintenance tasks, and many companies integrate SAP with a dedicated CMMS like eWorkOrders for more robust maintenance capabilities.
How do manufacturers use CMMS?
Manufacturers use CMMS to schedule preventive maintenance, track equipment performance, manage work orders, and maintain compliance with industry standards. It helps reduce downtime, optimize labor, and extend the life of critical assets.
What is the main function of CMMS?
The main function of a CMMS is to streamline and centralize maintenance operations by automating tasks like work order management, preventive maintenance, inventory tracking, and reporting. This leads to improved equipment reliability, cost control, and operational efficiency.
