Seven questions that actually predict success
- Can a technician complete a full job on a phone, offline, in under the time they have? Ask to watch it, on a real form, not a demo tile.
- Can the asset owner and a contractor both have accounts without seeing each other's data? Multi-organisation access is where factory software breaks.
- Who changes a form or a maintenance plan? If the answer involves the vendor's professional services team, budget for it forever.
- What does go-live actually cost? Licence plus implementation plus consultancy plus the year of internal time.
- How does it handle permits and safety? If safety controls are advisory rather than enforced, they will be bypassed.
- Where does stock truth come from? A system that treats a purchase request as stock will have you short on site.
- What happens when the O&M contract changes hands? If the data lives in the provider's tenancy, the owner loses the history.
The costs nobody puts in the proposal
| Cost | What to ask |
|---|---|
| Implementation | Fixed fee or time and materials? What happens if it overruns? |
| Configuration changes | Can we add a form field ourselves in year two, or is it a change request? |
| Extra users | Does adding a contractor cost per seat? If so, people will share logins, and your audit trail is fiction. |
| Integrations | Is the API included, and does it cover what you need or only what is easy? |
| Exit | Can you export everything, including attachments, without a fee? |
Adoption is the whole game
A CMMS that technicians avoid produces worse data than the spreadsheet it replaced, because the gaps are invisible. Adoption comes from three things: the mobile experience being genuinely quick, the forms matching the actual job, and the people who do the work seeing something back from it, such as previous fixes for the fault in front of them.
Test with your worst-case user on your worst-connected site, not with a project champion in an office.
A fair way to run the evaluation
- Pick three real jobs: a routine service, a defect found on inspection and an emergency callout needing a permit and a part.
- Ask each vendor to run those three end to end, in their product, on your asset types.
- Score what happened, not what was promised on the roadmap.
- Total the five-year cost including implementation and change requests.
We are happy to be judged that way. Our demo is thirty minutes on your own asset types with no slides, and our pricing page explains the model before you ask.
Common questions
How long should implementation take?
For a renewable portfolio, weeks. If a vendor quotes six to eighteen months, you are buying a project rather than a product.
Should we pick an energy-specific CMMS or a generic one?
Generic platforms can be configured to fit, at a cost in time and consultancy. Industry-specific workflows arrive already shaped like your work.
What is the single biggest mistake?
Choosing on the feature grid and never testing the mobile experience with a real technician on a real site.
Related
See it running on your own asset types
Thirty minutes, no slides. We set up your site structure and show you the product doing the job you actually need it to do. Most teams are live within weeks.
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