World's Easiest CMMS ? How 🤷🏻

Ever since we launched SuperCMMS, we have been claiming it to be the world's easiest CMMS.

That's a very bold claim to make.
Is this some marketing fluff?
How do we backup this bold claim.

We'll try to answer.

1.

First, Are we qualified enough?

We guess so.

We know what a complex CMMS looks, feels, and works like. How? We built one at our parent company. It works well and is used by lots of renewable energy companies to manage assets producing gigawatts of energy. It probably has about a hundred bells and whistles (features). One client asks for something specific and that ends up as a feature for everyone. Features creep in over time that are seldom used but make for good sales pitches - "Our CMMS is bigger than their CMMS".

2.

Why do complex CMMS's exist in the first place?

Let's try and answer this fundamental question.

CMMS falls under the category of 'Enterprise/B2B' software. As a general rule, enterprise software sucks.

Why?

Enterprise software has two customers. The one who buys it and the one who uses it. 'Management' buys the software. 'Regular field staff' are the end users. And that's the core of why enterprise software sucks.

Field staff need just those two or three features that help them finish their work. Management needs a hundred features to justify their purchase. Management needs jargon. That's why we see AI/ML/Blockchain stickers slapped on even everyday mundane software.

Management needs reports and analytics. That is why you see statements like, "Our software can improve your bottom-line by XX% and reduce wastage by YY%". These claims are hard to verify, but it rationalizes the buying process for management. To measure these claims would mean adding unnecessary features to the product. So one feature to do the actual work, two features to measure that work done, and a few dashboards to 'report' everything.

Management is a sort of bureaucracy. All purchases must be justified. So everyone tries to minimize their exposure to bad decisions. It is easier to justify the purchase of a software that has 100's of features rather than one that actually gets the job done. That's why we have epithets like, "No one gets fired for buying from IBM".

Management buying decision is influenced by long sales pitches driven by professional salesmen. Both parties have a peripheral understanding of the actual product but are trying to close a transaction. Having 100's of features creates room for 'negotiation'. "You can have 20 features for $$ or you can have all features for $$$$$". Finally both parties arrive at a middle-ground where they feel it's a win-win. Inputs from the actual users of the software rarely matter in the whole process.

And that's our understanding of why every CMMS on the market today is an over-engineered, over-complicated piece of rock that knocks the joy out of field staff.

In spite of having a CMMS with lots of features work still gets done over email and messaging apps. We know because we convert dashboards to pdf reports and email them to 'management' at 9 A.M. every day :(.

3.

The roadmap to building the world's easiest CMMS.

If you've read so far you must have gotten the drift of our approach in making SuperCMMS the world's easiest CMMS.

When researching for SuperCMMS, we analysed 1000's of work orders. We broke down and timestamped every action ever done on each of these work orders. We analysed the duration between timestamps. We understood where the bottle necks are and what caused them. We put most of our focus on what the field staff (the boots on the ground) want rather than on management needs.

All of this is not rocket science. It's a very simple approach called 'first principles' - basically deconstructing a complex process, throwing away the unwanted steps, and reconstructing the process to achieve the same end results.

There is a singular pattern exhibited by almost every work order we analysed. Every work order involved three actors and one goal. From all this we derived one insight.

The Three Actors:

1. An Asset that needs to be maintained.

2. A Staff Member that works on the Asset.

3. A Manager who oversees everything.

The Goal:

The goal is to keep the asset working well so the humans involved can be at peace (have a good nights rest).

The Insight:

Everything that interferes with the above goal is a distraction and causes friction and all things that cause friction must be eliminated.

4.

So how did we build the world's easiest CMMS?

This was actually easy.

The first principles approach showed us where the friction is and what features/steps to eliminate to achieve 'the goal'. Remember the 100's of features we kept mentioning earlier? Well, 90% of those are never used. In other words, you could make dummy 90% of those features and work would go on as usual.

So we set about to strip out all unnecessary features.

Anything that interfered with the "3-Actors-1-Goal" agenda had to go.

Lets illustrate with one little example that is easy to understand. Work Orders in most CMMS's have ...

• Priority: Low / Medium / High

• Status: To Do / Accepted / Work in Progress / Waiting for Parts / Closed / Rejected, etc.

SuperCMMS just has ...

• Priority - Normal / Urgent

• Status - To Do / Done

Now, we can have a never ending debate on the above. Different people will express different opinions. That's where we pull out our historical data. We clearly prove that most work orders were assigned a 'High' priority and started with a 'To Do' and ended with a 'Closed'. Very few had any intermediate states assigned to them.

Then we apply the first principles approach of axing unnecessary steps.

Then we put our foot down and say, "This is the way SuperCMMS is built. Our data has proven this approach to work. You may use SuperCMMS the way it is. If you want complexity, there are a hundred other CMMS's to choose from. The choice is yours".

We're not shooting blindly here. There's a method to this strip down. It's proven that having more information than necessary can actually hamper or delay decision making. They even have a name for it - Hicks Law.

Don't worry. This does not mean we have axed all features. On the contrary SuperCMMS has ALL the required features that you need to get your work done - in a much simpler way.

All that we discussed till now is the philosophical part of it. There are technical and design (UI/UX) decisions too. But both of these are easy - because the philosophical part has drawn up some tram lines that we cannot cross.

5.

Design Decisions.

Stripping down and simplifying features brings enormous design clarity. UI becomes cleaner. Every screen becomes quick to grasp at a glance. UX becomes pleasant. Take a look at our web and mobile apps (iPhone, Android) and compare them to any other CMMS apps you know of. You'll notice the difference immediately.

Technical Decisions.

Once again, since we are bound to a minimalist feature set, the technical decisions become super clear. No shiny stuff. Just regular Javascript and SQL made to run super efficiently. That's the reason why our apps are blazing fast and responsive. The only thing we have over architected for is redundancy - so that we can offer 99.95% uptime SLA's.

In closing, complex CMMS's do have their value - for large multi national organisations that need to capture minutest details, especially for audit trails. For SME's, a minimal CMMS can get the job done. As humans it is in our nature to hoard information You just need to be brave enough to know what information to throw away.

And that's how we make SuperCMMS the world's easiest CMMS.

SuperCMMS is Free.

SuperCMMS is free for 5 team members - forever and all features included. The paid version will save you a ton of money compared to ANY alternative on the market. We are able to offer it at this price because our marginal server costs are minimal owing to the way we built SuperCMMS.

Give it a try. Your team, especially the field staff, will love you for it.