09.04.06
CMMS Free Software Review
If you’ve visited to this blog before or even now, you’ll noticed that there are advertisements about free CMMS softwares and other stuff about facility management. We recently took a peek of one of them. We are really happy to know that it has been developed by a local Malaysian company. The name of the software is CWorks. Of course we are not as big as them as they are quite well established and they have a list of reputable clients. Maybe we could try and work with them some way in the future.
CMMS stands for Computerized Maintenance Management Software. Basically it is a software used to aid the process of maintenance for a building or organizations. So, instead of having it all on paper, you can now use a piece of software to process all the required work. Taking a typewriter as an example, a typewriter is noisy, time consuming and it cannot be corrected once you make a mistake. Nowadays, people use computers to type, store, print and retrieve any information in a click of a mouse. That saves up valuable precious time in today’s hectic schedule.
Taking it up another level, a popular way to collate data is by using spreadsheets. Here’s some issues concerning using spreadsheets:
- It’s easy to use (advantage)
- Easy to manipulate and configure at the beginning (advantage)
- Hard to search when the data is really big (disadvantage)
- Large amount of data can be corrupted easily when duplications occur (disadvantage)
So, how do you overcome the disadvantage concerning large amount of data? You need to build a database. What kind of database you may ask. For a start, you can use this piece of software:
CWorks CMMS uses Microsoft Access database in the background. Microsoft Access is a basic database management software sufficient to handle large data in a small scale.
CWorks CMMS simplifies maintenance work by putting all the data in organized database and retrieves the data in a click of a mouse. Best of all, you can try it for free first before you even buy it. The only software you need before downloading this software is Microsoft Access (the latest 2003 version is recommended).
You can also check out their product comparison page to see what other features they have. With so many features, the only missing thing for you to do is to build up the real usable database. Now that involves a lot of man hours and requires excrutiating process of data collection and collating mainly for facility managers. That is another subject to cover which involves Project Management but for now, we should start somewhere. This software is excellent for small scale or even expanding to big organizations who needs a simple ready to use software to manage their maintenance process but lack in numbers of personnel. For bigger needs, there is always other solutions (we recommend ARCHIBUS/FM) which we will discuss later on.
