Preventive maintenance management software is a category where every product does the same four things and they differ almost entirely in how easy each one is to do badly. That makes feature comparison close to useless and behaviour testing close to decisive. This page sets out the four behaviours that decide whether a preventive maintenance system changes anything, in the order they will bite you: how intervals behave when a job slips, whether the schedule can be seen as hours, where deferral shows up, and how hard it is to close a job without saying what was found.
What happens to the next three dates when a job is late
This one question separates two kinds of product. If the next occurrence is scheduled from when the job was actually completed, the interval stays real. If it is fixed to a calendar, every subsequent date is wrong in the same direction after the first slip, and within two quarters nobody trusts the schedule.
The schedule in hours, per technician
60 jobs a month is a fact; 66 technician hours across three people is a plan. On the worked example this site publishes that is $3,168 a month at a $48 loaded rate. Products that show only a calendar let a schedule be agreed that nobody ever checked was carryable.
Where deferral is visible
The list of jobs rescheduled more than once is the earliest warning available, and it is worth nothing behind a report nobody runs. Ask where a supervisor would trip over it without being told to look.
How hard it is to close without findings
The found field is what makes an interval improvable. A product where closing a job is one tap with no description will give you a year of ticks and nothing to reason with when somebody asks whether the six-month check is still right.
Questions people ask about preventive maintenance management software
What is the difference between preventive and preventative here?
Only the spelling. Both are used by vendors and both mean scheduled work done to stop a failure.
Do we need a full CMMS or just PM software?
If you have a register and work orders somewhere already, PM software alone can work. If you do not, PM software will grow a register and a work-order list of its own and you have bought a CMMS by accident.
How do we prove it worked?
Reactive share, quarter on quarter, and the deferral list. Completion percentage is the metric that is easiest to hit and hardest to learn anything from.