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Survey Shows Why You Need to Build a Mobile CMMS

What are the most used and important features in a Mobile CMMS?It’s one of the most important but overlooked tasks in many organizations: Maintenance management.  For industry sectors like oil & gas, manufacturing and utilities — as well as any company with a field services organization — it’s absolutely vital to a companies’ health. But it’s important for almost any company.

One of the best ways to perform better maintenance is to deploy a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). Better yet is a mobile CMMS, given that much maintenance needs to be performed not in a central location, but in many different ones.

A survey from Software AdviceMobile CMMS Software UserView offer a great deal of insight and advice about how mobile CMMSes are being used, what you need in one, and more. Let’s start off with what may be the most important finding: Respondents find mobile CMMSes improve people’s efficiency. A full 43% say a mobile CMMS offers a significant increase in efficiency, with 28% reporting a moderate increase. Only 13% reported no increase, while 16% said they had seen a minimal increase.

People who use mobile CMMS on a tablet rather than smartphone say they’ve had the most increase in efficiency: 65% report a significant increase, versus 41% who use smartphones, and a little under 20% for those who use both.
The most-used feature, by a slim margin, is inventory tracking, cited by 25% of users, followed by preventative maintenance, cited by 24%, then asset tracking (19%), predictive maintenance (17%) and work order management (15%).

The top benefit gained with a mobile CMMS is improved work order tracking, cited as the most important benefit by 42% of respondents. That’s followed by 21% who say it helps them make more informed decisions, 20% who say it increases productivity, and 17% who say it leads to decreased asset downtime.

Most Important and Most Used Mobile CMMS Features

As to what users want in a mobile CMMS, 40% say the most important requirement is real-time data access on all devices, followed by 32% who say an easy-to-use interface is important, and 28% who point to full functionality on a mobile device.

The most-used feature, by a slim margin, is inventory tracking, cited by 25% of users, followed by preventative maintenance, cited by 24%, then asset tracking (19%), predictive maintenance (17%) and work order management (15%).

Finally, workers use tablets more than they use smartphones for accessing a mobile CMMS, with 44% accessing one only on a tablet, 35% on a smartphone, and 21% on both.

The heart of a mobile CMMS system are forms. When building mobile forms, it’s important that they be mobile-optimized, and not just replicate paper-based forms. Alpha Software CTO Dan Bricklin explains, “These are applications that run on the tablet that can take advantage of a wide range of input types, that can have input means that are tailored to the needs of the particular data type and data values being entered, that can have layouts that are flexible, and that are customizable to the needs of the particular task.”

Learn how Alpha Anywhere can help you build sophisticated mobile-optimized forms.

Know more information about Bricklin’s recommendations on how to build the best tablet-based forms.

Also important for a mobile CMMS is that it be able to work even when Internet access isn’t available.More details about how Alpha Software lets you create mobile apps that work even when offline.

Read the Mobile CMMS Software UserView survey.

Additional Resources:

Why CMMS and IOT Integration Is the Future of Manufacturing

Read How IOT Coupled with an EAM CMMS Solution Can Help Managers and Engineers Execute Tasks Properly and Efficiently

What to Expect in Mobile Apps in 2017
Rise of the Citizen Developer - The Latest Data on the Trend

About Author

Amy Groden-Morrison
Amy Groden-Morrison

Amy Groden-Morrison has served more than 15 years in marketing communications leadership roles at companies such as TIBCO Software, RSA Security and Ziff-Davis. Most recently she was responsible for developing marketing programs that helped achieve 30%+ annual growth rate for analytics products at a $1Bil, NASDAQ-listed business integration Software Company. Her past accomplishments include establishing the first co-branded technology program with CNN, launching an events company on the NYSE, rebranding a NASDAQ-listed company amid a crisis, and positioning and marketing a Boston-area startup for successful acquisition. Amy currently serves as a Healthbox Accelerator Program Mentor, Marketing Committee Lead for the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge Launch Smart Clinics, and on the organizing team for Boston TechJam. She holds an MBA from Northeastern University.

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The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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