Selecting your CMMS vendor partner isn’t something to be approached casually. When it’s working right, this relationship truly is a partnership that can help determine the success of your CMMS implementation. These five tips help you make this selection armed with the knowledge you need to make the right one.
- Experience: This is an area that really counts. Select a vendor that has experience implementing CMMS solutions across many customers. eMaint has been helping companies manage their maintenance operations since 1986. With over 150,000 customers, eMaint understands your needs and has helped customers just like you.
- Training: Choose a vendor that offers a variety of training options to suit the needs of all your users. eMaint offers 24/7 access to eMaint University, live remote training, personalized on-site training, and Bootcamp training in our Experience Center. eMaint also offers free monthly web-workshops.
- Support: Select a vendor that not only supports you during implementation, but also after you go live with a variety of options to contact for support. eMaint offers 18 hours of live support via phone, email, and chat. In addition to our support team, our Professional and Enterprise level offers support from a Customer Success Manager. Your Customer Success Manager is familiar with your company, short- and long-term goals, and specific configurations in your eMaint account.
- Configurability: Opt for software that works with your company workflows and process—not one that forces you to adapt to fit the software workflows. eMaint’s CMMS software is fully configurable, from configuring fields, workflows, reports, and dashboards.
- Expandability: Does the CMMS vendor allow you to expand across multiple sites as you advance in your maintenance reliability journey? eMaint can support both single and multisite customers. And eMaint CMMS is part of the Accelix framework, so you can connect data from condition monitoring devices and other external monitoring sources (such as SCADA and PLC data). eMaint can help you work toward predictive maintenance operations.
The risks of choosing your vendor partner solely on price
Of course, we understand that price is an important part of your decision. But avoid the pitfall of selecting your vendor partner based on cost alone. The vendor may be the lowest cost option in year one, but if it does not fit your needs as you grow or your needs change, it may cost you more long term. Consider the costs associated with having to re-implement a new CMMS solution.
- Time. Time spent training your team to learn new software and then time spent re-training your team on the next software solution. Time is then lost on production or maintenance to re-train your stakeholders on a new CMMS solution.
- Financial Investment. Money spent on implementation, training, support, and user licenses to end up with a software solution that did not meet your needs.
- Productivity. If the software solution requires you to change your process to fit in the software design or layout, you and your team could spend extra time entering data, finding data, and understanding.
Related articles: