Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS)

A computerised maintenance management system is software that records an organisation's assets and manages maintenance work, including work orders, preventive maintenance schedules, spare parts, labour and maintenance history.

A CMMS holds an asset register, often structured as a hierarchy of sites, lines, machines and components, with technical data and documents for each item. Maintenance requests and work orders are created, prioritised, scheduled, assigned and closed in the system, and preventive maintenance tasks generate work orders automatically from calendar or meter-based triggers. Spare parts inventory, purchasing, labour hours and costs are linked to work orders, building a history of what failed, what was done and what it cost.

Maintenance teams use a CMMS to plan and schedule work, ensure statutory inspections are completed, control spare parts, and report key performance indicators such as MTBF, MTTR, planned maintenance percentage, backlog and maintenance cost. Mobile applications let technicians receive work orders and record findings at the machine, and integration with condition monitoring or machine data allows work orders to be triggered by condition. Integration with ERP links maintenance to purchasing and finance.

The value of a CMMS depends on data quality: incomplete asset registers, vague failure descriptions and work orders closed without details make analysis impossible. Standardised failure coding, such as the taxonomy in ISO 14224 for the petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industries, makes history more useful. Enterprise asset management systems extend CMMS functions across the full asset life cycle.

Key points

Manages asset registers, work orders, preventive maintenance and spares.
Builds maintenance history for reliability and cost analysis.
Reports KPIs such as MTBF, MTTR, backlog and planned maintenance percentage.
Data quality and consistent failure codes determine its value.

Where AiVibe comes in

AiAmbA AI Factory use cases include predictive maintenance and visual inspection on textile, automotive and electronics lines. AiAmbA IoT normalises industrial signals from protocols such as OPC UA and MQTT, with driver availability confirmed per installation.

Explore AiVibe’s work in Quality, Reliability & Maintenance →

Related terms

Terms that refer to Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS)

ISO 55000 Asset Management StandardsQuality, Reliability & Maintenance