CMMS vs ERP: Value of ERP in Asset Management

Businesses that manage considerable assets in the equipment sales and service industry are faced with a tough choice when it comes to their software. Do you choose a specific software solution built to solve one particular issue or a more robust business management system to help you effectively manage your operations?

It all depends on your business needs and which of the two most popular offerings – CMMS and ERP – have the features you need to manage your critical business processes.

What is CMMS?

Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) is software designed to track and manage the assets and resources that make up a company’s maintenance department or division. With this solution, you can monitor and record work orders, keep historical records of work that has been done, and track critical asset information for future reference.

One of the common challenges for organizations using a standalone CCMS is disparate business systems. If you’re using separate tools to run your business, like maintenance software and an accounting package, you could be driving up costs and causing inefficiencies with time-consuming manual processes, data entry errors, and other costly mistakes.

What is ERP?

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is a completely integrated business management solution that centralizes accounting and financials, purchasing, inventory management, contract management, sales, and more in a single tool for increased efficiency and cost savings.

Benefits of ERP

If maintenance and service is the core of your business, why would you consider an ERP over CMMS?

• Complete business management. An ERP enables you to manage your business from a single tool and provides opportunities to improve multiple business processes. The variety of functions make it a more cost-effective option to using several individual tools to run your business.
• Centralized business information. ERP software houses all your critical business information (e.g. inventory, contract, service, etc.) for increased accessibility, accurate data exchange, and increased collaboration. Across your business, your teams have the tools and information they need to do their jobs.
• Robust performance reporting. Don’t you want to know how your maintenance and service contracts are performing? What about how much you are making or losing on a single asset? ERP software provides advanced profitability reports so you can see how the business is performing at a high level (e.g. financial statements), how your accounts are doing at the customer level, and even understand individual asset and technician performance.
• Advanced customization. With implementation comes the opportunity to customize the configuration of the system to meet your unique business needs and drive efficiency.

Ultimately, an ERP focuses on more than maintenance, enabling you to improve all areas of your business. CCMS is built to solve one issue and is limited by the integrations they have available, which means you could only be improving a single part of your business.

Find out how ERP can eliminate the headache of managing multiple systems and give you the critical maintenance and service management features you need (and more!) to grow your business.

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