The CMMS FM failure is rate widely accepted to be 70% to 80%.
That’s a high percentage of CMMS implementations failing to meet expectations or deliver their promised value, including verifiable cost savings.
While the most powerful “market leading” platforms excel at managing, tracking, and analyzing cost information based on the data they are given, offering high flexibility in how this data is structured (including WBS configuration for CSI MasterFormat) and extensive visibility through analytics, they do not include a built-in, universal database of objective, granular local market cost data for labor, materials, equipment, and productivity.
Users are responsible for inputting or integrating this specific, localized data, either manually or via integration with specialized external cost-estimating databases, to achieve “true cost visibility” in that specific sense. As we all know building a maintaining a verfiable, objective, well organized COST database is nontrivial, even in the world of AI.
Unfortuanately many/most FMers do not understand the criticality of comparing costs to market prices (quotes). Without COSTS, cost visibility and cost management are impossible.
- Lack of Planning and Clear Objectives: Many organizations implement a CMMS without a clear strategy or defined, measurable goals (e.g., “reduce emergency repairs by X%”). Without a destination, it is impossible to know if you’ve arrived or measure the savings.
- Poor Data Quality and Input: The CMMS is only as good as the data entered into it. Inaccurate, incomplete (Lack of accurate cost information for Preventive Maintenance (PM) and associated tasks), or inconsistently formatted data (e.g., asset lists, maintenance history, spare parts inventory) leads to unreliable reports and bad decision-making.
- Insufficient User Adoption and Training: This is often cited as the single most common reason for failure. If technicians and staff are not involved in the selection process, inadequately trained, or resistant to changing from paper-based systems, they simply won’t use the new system consistently, undermining its potential benefits.
- Lack of Management Support: When leadership views the CMMS as a “tech project” rather than an operational transformation, the initiative often loses traction and necessary ongoing support and resources.
- “Do-It-Yourself” Implementation and Scope Creep: Attempting a complex implementation without professional help or trying to use every feature/module at once can overwhelm teams and lead to haphazard results.
- Failure to Establish Standard Processes: A CMMS works best when it enhances an already mature process, not when it is used to fix broken workflows or a purely reactive maintenance culture. The software provides the structure, but the organization must provide the standardized operating procedures.
- Complexity: Systems that are not intuitive or require too many steps to complete basic tasks (like closing a work order) can alienate users and lead to poor adoption rates.
Lack of accurate cost information for Preventive Maintenance (PM) and associated tasks is a significant contributing factor to the high failure rate of CMMS systems in delivering verifiable cost savings. Without this critical data, facility managers cannot demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) because they cannot accurately compare the cost of proactive maintenance versus the much higher cost of reactive maintenance.
- Inability to Perform a True Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA): You can’t perform an accurate CBA if you don’t know the specific labor, parts, and materials costs for PM tasks. This makes it impossible to definitively prove that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” in a financial report to management.
- Difficulty Justifying the PM Program: Without hard numbers showing that planned maintenance reduces expensive emergency repairs, it’s difficult to justify the budget and resources allocated to the PM program to leadership, who often view maintenance as a pure cost center.
- Skewed Performance Metrics: If the true costs of reactive maintenance (e.g., premium overtime rates, expedited parts shipping, extended downtime) aren’t captured and compared against the PM costs, the performance of the maintenance team and the CMMS itself is inaccurately represented.
- Poor Decision Making: Managers cannot identify which assets are truly “problem assets” or which PM frequencies are most cost-effective without accurate cost data. Decisions about whether to repair or replace equipment are based on intuition rather than data-driven financial analysis.
- Underestimation of Total Savings: Organizations often track only obvious costs like parts and labor, over/underestimating total maintenance expenses by 35-45%+. This leads to inaccurate ROI projections that don’t reflect the actual value delivered by the CMMS and PM program and financial waste.
- Manual Tracking Inefficiencies: When work orders are tracked manually or inconsistently, hours worked, specific parts used, and associated costs are often missed, duplicated, or estimated poorly.
- Lack of Integration: If the CMMS is not fully integrated with other systems like accounting/ERP or inventory management, costs are siloed and not reflected in a unified view.
- No Common Data Environment: A failure to establish standard definitions and consistent methods for tracking costs across the organization makes it nearly impossible to aggregate and analyze the data effectively, such as a robust objective PM cost database.
1️⃣ Define and calculate PM costs
2️⃣ Estimate regular maintenance
3️⃣ Estimate unscheduled tasks
4️⃣ Monitor expenditure
5️⃣ Analyze deviations and implement corrections.
Facilities PM Cost Management
⭐ Improve facilities, systems, and component availability and improve life-cycle cost management.
⭐ Gain true cost visibility for your local market preventive maintenance requirements, including labor and material details.
⭐ Better prepare PM schedules and labor requirements.
⭐ Validate bids/proposals from PM services providers.
⭐ Access checklists for each system and associated time-based event, based upon industry standards.
⭐ Improve compliance and monitoring for both operations in-house and outsourced.
⭐ Determine the total PM cost for a facility based upon your inventory list.