Mobile CMMS software is usually evaluated on a laptop, which is the one place it will never be used. The only test that matters is whether a technician standing at a machine, with dirty hands and possibly no signal, can raise a job in under a minute and get back to work. Everything about the record you eventually get depends on that, because the alternative is not a worse record, it is a record written from memory at the end of the shift with rounder hours and thinner findings. This page sets out how to test mobile properly and what to insist on.
Time it on a phone, in the demo, with the screen locked first
Unlock, open, find the asset, describe the job, save. Under a minute is the bar. Vendors will demonstrate on a tablet at a desk; ask for a phone and ask to do it yourself, because the difference between one minute and three is the difference between a record and a reconstruction.
Test it with no signal
Plant rooms, basements, yards and cold stores are where equipment lives and where signal is not. A product that loses a job raised offline will be blamed for missing history it caused, and the failure is silent: the technician thinks it saved.
Scanning the asset is worth more than it looks
A QR or barcode on the machine that opens the right asset removes the commonest source of bad data, which is a job logged against the wrong pump because two are named similarly. It also removes the pause where a technician decides it is not worth it.
Photographs are the found field people will actually use
A picture of a worn belt takes four seconds and says more than a sentence typed with gloves on. A mobile product that makes photographs one tap gets findings recorded that would otherwise be spoken and lost.
Questions people ask about mobile cmms software
Do technicians need their own logins?
Yes. A shared login destroys the who, and the who is what makes a log answerable and a job assignable. It also makes any question about a past job unanswerable.
Phones or rugged tablets?
Phones, usually, because people already carry them and already keep them charged. Rugged hardware is worth it where gloves and wet hands make a touchscreen unusable, which is a real constraint in some plants.
What if technicians will not use it?
Time the raise. Resistance is almost always a proxy for the job taking too long, and the fix is the product or the process rather than the people.