Guides
Maintenance, written down
What a CMMS is, what it is not, and how the work actually runs. Written for people who maintain machines rather than for people who buy software.
Computerised maintenance management system. A long name for a short idea: one record per machine, and a history that survives the engineer who made it.
One is organised around the machine. The other is organised around the job and the customer. Almost everything else follows from that.
A work order is two documents pretending to be one: the instruction to go, and the record of what happened. Most of the ways they fail come from confusing the two.
An asset register is the spine of any maintenance system. Most of them fail on the two dullest fields: what the machine is called, and how you get to it.
Most maintenance software is built for a plant you own and can schedule. HVAC contracting is the opposite of that in almost every respect, which is why so much of it fits badly.