When ERPs such as SAP and Oracle Aren’t Enough for Maintenance

Maintenance departments are often overlooked for the new and up-to-date tools and software needed to properly run their departments. In many cases, IT departments or corporate decision-makers force the maintenance departments to use corporate enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, such as SAP or Oracle, which have limited maintenance modules, to handle their maintenance tasks. These ERP maintenance modules are often added as an afterthought and have limited functionality when it comes to maintenance.

We have many customers who were forced to move to one of these corporate ERP systems, only to discover the system failed to handle their needs as well as a CMMS-focused solution, such as MaintiMizer, could have. After using the corporate ERP for a while, they returned to MaintiMizer. With the help of our professional services team, our customers created interfaces to these ERPs from MaintiMizer to ensure a seamless, harmonious system that would handle their complex maintenance needs and feed data back and forth to keep information synced between the two systems. MaintiMizer constantly proves to be the best solution for our customers. You should consider this solution when your IT or corporate decision-makers demand the use of minimally functional maintenance modules of an ERP such as SAP or Oracle.

One recent example of this was when corporate decision-makers asked a long-time MaintiMizer user to use Oracle’s limited maintenance module. Because they already use Oracle for other corporate needs, the company decided the transition would work for their other departments. Why fix something that isn’t broken? The problem many plant engineers find is that they cannot provide reports on their costs when corporate asks them to. A condition-based software system only logs when an asset needs to be repaired. It does not log who is working on it, when it was last worked on, what parts were used, and how long it took to fix it. All these details provide a breakdown of costs to fix and maintain that asset. So, when one of our customers switched their department to condition-based maintenance with Oracle, they quickly realized condition-based maintenance wasn’t enough.

In theory, condition-based maintenance makes sense. However, upon closer inspection, condition-based maintenance is lacking in many ways. The customer’s struggle was identifying how money was spent in their department. They needed software to allocate parts to assets and labor hours to PM work. They needed to know why a specific part was used, and they needed a way to look up preventative maintenance work orders by date. These are all operations ERPs such as SAP and Oracle can’t perform easily or completely. However, MaintiMizer provides in-depth cost breakdowns and can easily look up an asset’s repair history. Our professional services team ensured this customer’s MaintiMizer system could provide their ERP with the data corporate needed, making both the maintenance department and corporate happy.

Servicing the mining, oil and gas, and industrial industries, this customer is a leading manufacturer of jacketed electrical power, control, and instrumentation cables. As a customer-focused company, their top priority is to help our customers be more productive and profitable with high-quality cable products and services, fast reliable delivery, field engineering support, and outstanding customer service. Being more productive and profitable, means they need a preventative maintenance plan to reduce downtime and be cost efficient to deliver on their promise. With MaintiMizer, they can deliver exactly that.