A preventive maintenance app is bought by a manager and judged by a technician, and only one of those opinions determines whether the data is any good. What the technician needs is narrow: find the asset fast, see what the task is, record what was found, record the time, and get on. What the manager wants, dashboards and completion rates, is downstream of that and worth nothing if the first part is slow. This page is about the technician's half, because it is the half that decides whether there is anything in the system to report on.
Finding the asset is the first friction point
Scrolling a list of 180 assets on a phone with gloves on is where a technician decides to write it up later. A code on the machine that opens the right asset removes both the scrolling and the risk of logging against the wrong one of two similar pumps.
The task has to be readable at the machine
The planned task list, in steps, on the screen, not in a PDF attachment that has to be downloaded. If the app makes the task hard to read, the technician does the job from memory, which is fine until the person with the memory leaves.
Photographs are the found field people will actually use
Typing with gloves is miserable; a photograph takes four seconds and carries more than a sentence. An app that makes a photograph one tap gets findings recorded that would otherwise be mentioned in passing and lost.
Time capture has to be honest and easy
A start and stop that a technician can use without thinking, or durations that are round numbers invented at the end of the day. The schedule is priced in hours, 66 a month on the worked example this site publishes, and every one of those hours comes from this field.
Questions people ask about preventive maintenance app
Should we buy a separate PM app?
Rarely. If the app is separate from the register and the schedule, you have two systems and a sync problem. It is a feature of the CMMS rather than a product.
Do technicians need training on it?
Ten minutes, at a machine, doing a real job. If it needs more than that, the app is the problem rather than the training.
What about older technicians who dislike phones?
Usually a speed complaint rather than a technology one. Time the raise with them: when it is genuinely quicker than a paper card, resistance tends to disappear.