Any physical product or service goes through its value chain from raw material, through manufacturing processes that include some form of conversion, and finally to customers. All along the value chain, industries and service companies utilize assets that depreciate over a period of time.

Physical assets break down, malfunction and ultimately work below efficiency, leading to under-performance and bad quality. These have an effect on the bottom line of organizations. In the beginning, organizations resorted to fighting these problems, which was reactive in nature and was like attacking symptoms than the problems.

The advent of management concepts such as Total Productive Management led to new thinking to solve maintenance-related problems. It predicted the breakdown of the equipment and approached the problem proactively. With this approach, the management of assets became regular. Still, these concepts were paper intensive and in most cases were merely a collection of records. This required additional work to maintain such a volume of data.

Computerized maintenance management software tools have become a powerful tool in the hands of maintenance and facility managers to handle the day-to-day operations of their departments, and plan for long-term utilization of their assets with the minimal usage of resources. The MMS tools help the manager to maximize the productivity of the asset in its entire life cycle. The MMS tools provide historic data and analysis of the assets, to help determine when to dispose of the old and purchase new assets.

Maintenance management software finds applications in various industries, like real estate, manufacturing and logistics. Any good MMS should meet the basic requirements of the client. The basic requirements are work management, physical assets management and resource management. Work management functions should generate work orders for planned and unplanned works. Physical asset management should track the asset through tools like work history, data management and accounting management. Resource management should track the inventory of parts and labor availability. The other features that MMS should have are management reporting capabilities, regulatory compliance and seamless interface with other systems.

With the proliferation of software vendors in the market, a high rate of technological obsolescence and a high rate of failure of the systems, it is very important for managers to select the right tool. This is further compounded by the presence of different decision-makers with different criteria, like financing for low-cost systems and maintenance for feature-rich systems.