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Easily Shortlist & Compare Equipment Maintenance Software to Improve the Safety and Maintenance of your Heavy, Fixed, and Movable Equipment.
Equipment Maintenance Software is a system used by maintenance teams to plan, schedule, track, and analyse maintenance activities for equipment. It provides in-depth equipment-focused tools that allow technicians to automate and deploy maintenance strategies and deliver greater uptime and reliability of heavy equipment. Whereas CMMS Software encompasses a business’s maintenance activities for all physical assets, Equipment Maintenance Software focuses primarily on equipment and machinery maintenance tasks. That includes maintenance for heavy equipment, construction equipment, farm and agriculture equipment, and specialised equipment.
FaultFixers is a cloud-based Equipment Maintenance Software providing features that focus on the upkeep of equipment including equipment list/register, importing equipment data, and equipment maintenance tracking. Key strengths include planned and reactive maintenance planning as well as mobile management. It is designed with SMBs in mind to help replace spreadsheets and paper-based processes with a digital alternative.
Price: From £99 per month
Implementation: 7 days to 4 weeks
Workmate is an Equipment Maintenance Software product that has a key strength of equipment listing and tracking. It is an easy-to-adopt maintenance system presented as an all-in-one solution and works via a dedicated mobile app.
Price: From £1,490
Implementation: 4 weeks to 3 months
MaintainX is a self-service Equipment Maintenance Software with a focus on helping businesses easily scale their equipment maintenance operations. It is a cloud-based solution that provides a maintenance platform for all business sizes, from start-up to enterprise. Key features include mobile management, dashboard reporting, and integrated messaging.
Price: From £13 per user per month
Implementation: 24 hours to 4 weeks
ShireSystem is modular Equipment Maintenance Software product used within industries such as manufacturing and engineering. It is designed to help users digitally upgrade their equipment maintenance processes from spreadsheets and manual admin. Key features include equipment tracking, planned and preventive maintenance planning, and inventory management.
Price: From £744 per annum
Implementation: 4 weeks to 3 months
PEMAC ASSETS is a Equipment Maintenance Software solution ideal for compliance-intensive industries, like those with heavy and portable equipment. It provides dedicated maintenance modules such as predictive and preventive and offers real-time visibility into key maintenance processes. The ideal buyer for this product is a tier 2 manufacturing organisation with over 50 employees.
Price: POA
Implementation: 7 days to 3 months
MaintMaster is a cloud-based Equipment Maintenance Software that is utilised for equipment maintenance processes with features such as equipment tracking, preventive maintenance planning, and sensor integration. It’s key strengths are in customisation and condition-monitoring, which have been used by businesses in industries such as engineering, construction, and manufacturing.
Price: From £319 per month
Implementation: 4 weeks to 3 months
Equipment Maintenance Software is implemented to deliver on four key objectives:
To achieve these goals, it provides features such as workflow management, maintenance scheduling, work order management, inventory management, and reporting and analytics.
These features enable maintenance teams to deploy preventive, predictive, condition-based, and reactive maintenance strategies for equipment. With a comprehensive maintenance management plan, companies can see an ROI of up to 545% over 5 years.
But what does this mean in terms of overall potential savings?
The cost of implementing Equipment Maintenance Software ranges between £1,200 and £5,500 a year (based on the requirements of up to 100 users and 500 monthly work orders). The average cost works out to be about £3,000 per annum.
You might wince at an upfront cost of £3,000, but factor in your current spend of maintaining equipment.
Consider the emergency breakdown costs (including labour fees and rush orders for parts), the cost of replacement parts, and the cost of replacing equipment entirely that is beyond repair.
As an example, take the replacement and repair costs of a Tracked Excavator – like the JCB 220X range:
In this example, the worst-case scenario is you incur all of these costs in one financial period. That’s an outgoing of almost £80,000 (before considering the impact of unplanned downtime).
Looking at the repair costs alone (minus the cost of replacing the equipment), the total is £9,000. If your fleet includes a total of three Tracked Excavators and you’re unfortunate to experience similar repair costs in the same year, that’s almost £27,000.
Regular, scheduled maintenance activities using Equipment Maintenance Software can significantly lower emergency and unplanned repair costs. Even if it’s by an average of 60%, that’s a yearly saving of £16,200.
Year 1 | Year 3 | Year 5 | |
|---|---|---|---|
Avg. Savings on Repair Costs | £16,200 | £48,600 | £81,000 |
Avg. Equipment Maintenance Software Costs | £3,000 | £3,000 | £3,000 |
Total Avg. Savings | £13,200 | £45,600 | £78,000 |
Those considering an equipment maintenance system typically fall into two categories:
Either way, a lack of regular, routine maintenance checks and inspections will result in a multitude of challenges. All of which you have likely experienced in the last 5 years.
If you’ve experienced a significant loss of production due to unplanned downtime, you’re not alone. 82% of equipment-focused businesses encounter unplanned downtime at least once every three years.
Costs incurred due to unplanned equipment downtime include:
While once every three years might not seem like a lot, when analysing the data, those outages lasted on average four hours and cost up to $2 million. In the manufacturing industry, downtime can cost up to $260,000 every hour. On top of that, the probability of downtime costing businesses $1 million or less a year is over half (56%).
Breakdowns are expected when working with heavy equipment due to the upkeep of so many moving parts. Common issues include:
On average, heavy equipment runs between 1,000 to 2,000 hours per year, with an average lifespan of 10 to 15 years. During that time, wear and tear is expected due to the heavy use of equipment and harsh environmental conditions for some portable equipment.
There are ways to combat excessive wear and tear, like inspecting equipment for dust and debris after operation. Or using protective coatings on equipment when operating in corrosive environments.
The goal of Equipment Maintenance Software is to help prevent emergency breakdowns that can occur when equipment is not routinely inspected on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. In this scenario, routine inspections highlight potential problems that may otherwise have gone unnoticed, like cracks in undercarriages or glass protection panels.
Worker health and safety is of the utmost importance. Acts like the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Supply of Machinery (Safety) Regulations 2008 are put in place to ensure that.
Unfortunately, neglect in machinery upkeep and maintenance can impact this. One in three workplace deaths are caused by unsafe maintenance practices.
Regular maintenance, inspections, and checks of equipment go a long way to making sure workshop employees, on-site staff, and operators are safe in their working environment while equipment is running.
That includes measures like:
Studies by the US Department of Energy and the Building Owners and Managers Association analyse the comparison of maintenance approaches to HVAC equipment. The first is showing the difference in cost per horsepower (HP) per year (YR):
The study then compared the expected life of a 20-ton air conditioner unit, with a 14-year life expectancy, that had been poorly maintained against one that had been well-maintained.
As shown below, the well-maintenance equipment (curve 2) reached its 14-year expectancy while maintaining high output. Whereas the poorly maintained equipment (curve 1) saw year-on-year performance drops and had a life expectancy of just 9 years.
Source: ramech
A leading global mining company deployed industrial Equipment Maintenance Software (uptake) to predict and prevent failures. These failures were causing significant unplanned downtime of equipment used for transporting iron ore from mining sites to the seaport.
This company had already collected huge amounts of historical data regarding Wheel Impact Load Detection (WILD), Wheel Condition Monitoring (WCM), Hot-Box Temperature Detection (HBD), and Bearing Acoustic Measurement (BAM). So they deployed the AI-powered equipment maintenance system for its advanced analytics capabilities.
By doing so, the system could prescribe recommended solutions based on predictive outcomes. They reduced downtime of unscheduled maintenance, on average, by 50%. Saving $34 million in maintenance costs over 5 years.
There are two types of Equipment Maintenance Software; cloud-based and on-premise.
Cloud-based equipment maintenance products are referred to as software as a service (SaaS), whereby the data that your system collects electronically is stored on a vendor’s server and the product is accessed via a login page.
On-premise equipment maintenance products are stored and operated locally on company-owned servers.
When choosing between the two, the key factors impacting your purchasing decision are costs, deployment time, security, and scaling potential (a software’s ease of use, training, and accessibility are more product-based).
Cloud-based | On-premise | |
|---|---|---|
USPs |
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Upfront costs | Low: Costs can be spread across monthly payments. Implementation and configuration fees may apply. | High: Obtaining a perpetual license, IT infrastructure, computing resources, and the space to store equipment. |
On-going costs | Low: Monthly payments to fit your budget. | High: Maintenance of IT infrastructure, costs to run and facilitate equipment, and hiring staff to maintain and update the system. |
Time to implement | Quick: Instant access to the product after purchasing it. | Long: Requires installation, configuring, testing, and deploying. |
Data security | Good: Regular system updates and security patches are automatically pushed during off-peak working hours. | Good: Less susceptible to cyber threats, but in-house patches and updates can take time and cost money. |
Scaling potential | Good: Move up a subscription tier offered by the vendor and increase monthly payments. | Okay: Although straight-forward it comes at a cost, requiring additional physical infrastructure and space. |
The cost of Equipment Maintenance Software varies. It depends on factors like the number of maintenance personnel using it, the number of work orders and service requests created each month, the level of training and support required, and specific product features.
To get a detailed average cost, you need to be clear about what you need. In this example, let’s take a cloud-based Equipment Maintenance Software product that has monthly payment tiers for small, medium, and large businesses.
As extra costs are rare with SaaS products, the example below does not factor in fees for implementation, training, configuration, customisation, and storage.
Small Teams (1-10 Users) | Medium Teams (10-50 Users) | Large Teams (50-100 Users) | |
|---|---|---|---|
Avg. Upfront Costs | £0 | £0 | £0 |
Avg. Monthly Cost | £95 | £450 | £2,400 |
Total Avg. Yearly Cost | £1,140 | £5,400 | £28,800 |
Equipment Maintenance Software is utilised primarily by organisations reliant on equipment uptime for overall business operations. For instance, although a maintenance system can benefit an e-commerce business in terms of managing computer and server maintenance, it would prominently impact a CNC machinery plant more.
Six key industries utilise equipment maintenance systems:
Preventive maintenance reduces the likelihood of unplanned downtime for equipment by routinely scheduling checks, services, and maintenance activities.
When it comes to maintenance management, a preventative approach is the most popular. 80% of maintenance leaders view preventive maintenance as a top priority compared to reactive and predictive plans.
Pros of Preventive Equipment Maintenance | Cons of Preventive Equipment Maintenance |
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Predictive maintenance programs utilise data collected from IoT sensors and condition-monitoring devices to analyse patterns in equipment performance and predict when failures will occur.
Predictive maintenance reduces maintenance costs by 25-30%, breakdowns by 70-75%, and downtime by 35-45%. 91% of manufacturers who deployed a predictive maintenance program saw a reduction in repair time.
Pros of Predictive Equipment Maintenance | Cons of Predictive Equipment Maintenance |
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Deploying condition-based monitoring techniques for equipment involves the real-time monitoring of operating conditions through advanced sensors. Once identified, a set trigger event occurs and notifies of the maintenance required.
CBM can be condensed into a 3-stop method:
Pros of Condition-Based Equipment Maintenance | Cons of Condition-Based Equipment Maintenance |
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A corrective, or reactive, approach to equipment management means only addressing an issue once it has happened. Although this approach can be time-consuming, expensive (it has a 40% higher cost expectancy than preventive maintenance), and result in unplanned downtime, it is unavoidable in certain scenarios.
Take a jammed printer for example. This is a situation that can not be planned for. So, instead, it becomes a reactive maintenance task as a work order is raised and prioritised to fix the printer.
Pros of Reactive Equipment Maintenance | Cons of Reactive Equipment Maintenance |
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There are other methods for focusing on equipment maintenance aside from implementing an equipment maintenance system. The top three methods of maintenance management are pen-and-paper (39%), spreadsheets (52%), and software (63%).
These alternative options are handy to keep in mind when factoring in budgets, requirements, and time:
The average cost of cloud-based Equipment Maintenance Software is roughly £1000 per month. Depending on the number of users and work order/service requests required, that average yearly cost will vary:
For on-premise solutions, the average price is different. On top of the cost of a perpetual license, you must also factor in the cost of:
The average implementation time of a cloud-based (SaaS) equipment maintenance system is 3-6 months. Whereas for an on-premise solution, the time scale ranges between 1-2 years.
For cloud-based solutions, implementation time is instant. This is because you’re essentially renting server space from a vendor that is already set up and ready to use. The only time-consuming factors to consider would be training employees to use the system (typically 1-3 months) and integration with existing systems.
For on-premise systems, implementation is only complete once the IT infrastructure is in place and all configuration processes are finalised. Once done, then time is spent on customisation and testing.
The answer is both. Most Equipment Maintenance Software products are designed with business of all sizes in mind, providing pricing structures for small teams of 5 users to large teams of over 100 users.
For SMBs, an equipment maintenance system is designed to alleviate manual process such as using spreadsheets and give insight into data analytics.
For large businesses, it can address complex issues such as managing the maintenance of multiple equipment and fleets across a number of sites in different countries and provide everything needed to scale operations.
The usability of an Equipment Maintenance Software product is entirely depend on factors such as vendor-led training, support offered, and familiarity.
For on-premise solutions, the system is entirely customised to the way you work. If it has been set up properly, there should be no usability issues.
For cloud-based solutions, these are vendor-designed platforms, which can take some time getting used to. This is why it’s important to factor in 1-3 months of user training for a new SaaS system.
