How CMMS Improves Your Maintenance Efficiency

Key Takeaways:

• Unplanned downtime costs companies $125,000 per hour.
• 78% of manufacturers faced shutdowns due to missing spare parts.
• A CMMS helps teams shift from reactive to preventive maintenance.
• Mobile CMMS cuts technician downtime and improves response speed.

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When machines break down without warning or parts go missing, your entire operation pays the price.

And if you’re relying on paper checklists or scattered spreadsheets, staying ahead feels impossible.

That’s where a CMMS steps in.

Not as another tool, but as a smarter way to run maintenance.

Today, we will explore how a CMMS can boost your team’s efficiency, reduce downtime, and give you the visibility and control you’ve been missing.

Automates Preventive Maintenance

In many facilities, maintenance still follows a reactive approach: equipment breaks, and then the team scrambles to fix it.

But this run-to-failure model leads to unplanned downtime, safety risks, and inflated repair costs.

Preventive maintenance is the smarter approach, and statistics show that more and more professionals are embracing it.

Still, managing hundreds of PM tasks is challenging, especially without a digital system.

Scheduling inspections, organizing checklists, and tracking usage manually simply doesn’t scale.

That’s where a CMMS like WorkTrek comes in.

A CMMS helps automate preventive maintenance based on time intervals, usage thresholds, or meter readings.

For example, you can set WorkTrek to schedule a belt inspection every 200 operating hours, trigger an oil change every six months, or create a work order whenever the HVAC supply air temperature exceeds 32°C.

The system sends alerts, generates work orders, and keeps tasks from falling through the cracks.

That consistency helps you catch minor issues before they spiral into costly failures.

And just how expensive are they?

According to ABB’s 2023 “Value of Reliability” survey, over two-thirds of industrial businesses suffer unplanned outages at least once per month, with the average outage costing nearly $125,000 per hour.

Virve Viitanen from ABB puts that into perspective:

“There’s no typical length for an outage, but consider one that lasts a working day of eight hours. Based on the median hourly rate, it would cost a business one million dollars.”

She also emphasizes the importance of shifting away from reactive maintenance toward more strategic, cost-saving maintenance strategies.

A CMMS makes that shift possible.

A CMMS gives you the structure needed to stay ahead of failures, not chase them, by automating scheduling, organizing tasks, and delivering real-time alerts.

Fewer surprise breakdowns mean fewer delays, better production flow, and less firefighting.

And that’s real efficiency.

Streamlines Work Order Management

For a maintenance manager, just tracking the status of every task can feel like a full-time job.

But delays are common when work orders are scattered across spreadsheets, emails, or paper forms, and priorities get lost.

A 2024 survey by JLL Technologies found that 44% of facility managers spend most of their time tracking work order progress.

To make matters worse, over 55% saw a rise in work orders compared to the previous year.

In highly reactive environments, staying organized becomes even harder, primarily when information is spread across disconnected systems.

That’s why centralization matters.

A CMMS brings work order management into one platform.

You can create tasks, assign them to technicians, attach photos or checklists, include safety instructions and PPE requirements, and monitor real-time progress—all in one place.

Below, you can see all the data a work order can include:

You can also set priority levels, link tasks to specific assets, and pull reports that show completion rates, time-to-close, and backlog trends.

The best part is that you can see all work orders in multiple views, including a list, scheduler, and a map, like in the example below:

In short, a CMMS eliminates paperwork, reduces admin load, improves accountability, and increases visibility.

So, it’s not surprising that 65% of maintenance professionals say the top reason they use a CMMS is to organize all maintenance data in one place, according to UpKeep’s 2025 State of Maintenance Report.

With everything centralized, maintenance planning becomes easier, trends are clearer, and duplicate or missed work is far less likely.

Still, inaccurate or incomplete work order information remains a major issue, but it’s often the result of relying on outdated methods like paper forms or spreadsheets.

According to the same UpKeep report, 27% of teams struggle to maintain accurate work order data, directly impacting their efficiency.

This highlights the need for digital tools, structured workflows, real-time updates, and proper training.

A CMMS supports all of that.

It enables managers to track tasks accurately, allocate resources effectively, and drive faster, more reliable, and less reactive maintenance execution.

One of the ways it does that is with mobile functionality.

Speeds Up Work With Mobile Access

On the shop floor, every minute counts.

For technicians, every extra trip to the office—whether to pick up printed work orders or check on parts—cuts into wrench time.

Before switching to mobile CMMS tools, many teams lost time retrieving instructions or waiting for updates.

Danielle Rivers, Director of Business Services at Camden Property Trust, described it this way:

The daily back-and-forth for keys, updates, and signatures made everything more inefficient.

Mobile access changes that.

With a CMMS like WorkTrek, technicians receive work orders directly on their phones. These orders include asset history, step-by-step instructions, required parts, and even a pinned map location for the task.

They can update progress, add notes, upload photos, and close tickets in real time, no matter where they are.

Technicians can even create follow-up tasks on the spot when they uncover new issues during inspections.

The result is faster communication, fewer delays, and less reliance on memory or phone calls to report problems.

At Tulco Oils in Oklahoma, the maintenance team uses their mobile CMMS to react instantly when equipment fails.

Don Stanton, Vice President of Operations, explains:

“When a piece of equipment is not operational, we can tap in and create a work order without having to run someone down or spend time trying to contact someone by phone.”

In short, a CMMS with mobile access speeds up response times, improves communication, and ensures technicians spend more time doing what matters most: fixing and maintaining equipment.

Ensures the Right Parts Are Always in Stock

Even the best maintenance plan can fall apart if spare parts aren’t available.

Without them, scheduled tasks stall, technicians wait, and downtime drags on.

In fact, 78% of manufacturers have experienced shutdowns due to a lack of spare parts, according to a 2022 survey.

One real-world case, shown in the video below, drives the point home.

When a critical component wasn’t in stock, a plant faced more than 16 hours of downtime, all because of poor storeroom management and delayed deliveries.

In such situations, customers can feel the impact, too, and the price of lost production can be steep.

A CMMS helps eliminate these costly gaps by automating and organizing parts management.

When a part is assigned to a work order, the system automatically updates the inventory once the task is completed.

You can also set minimum stock thresholds to receive alerts before supplies run low, giving you time to reorder before a problem occurs.

A CMMS can also help you track where parts are stored, schedule reorders, and prevent overstocking, ensuring you have exactly what you need and when you need it.

And the impact is real.

A 2024 industry report found that 59% of facilities that improved parts inventory management reduced their unplanned downtime costs.

With better visibility into what’s available and what’s needed, maintenance teams stay prepared, efficient, and in control.

Improves Labor Planning

Labor is one of the biggest maintenance expenses, and also one of the easiest places to lose money.

According to McKinsey, maintenance typically makes up 10–25% of total operating costs, and over half of that goes to labor.

Yet many facilities still face common inefficiencies, such as:

• Assigning two technicians to a one-person task
• Wasting hours due to poor scheduling
• Losing time tracking down parts

Whether your team is in-house or outsourced, the result is the same: you’re paying for avoidable waste.

A CMMS helps eliminate these inefficiencies by enabling smarter, more strategic labor planning.

Managers can assign tasks based on technician availability, certifications, asset criticality, and shift schedules, so no one’s overloaded, underutilized, or misassigned.

With drag-and-drop calendars, shift views, and labor utilization dashboards, CMMS platforms make it easy to balance workloads, reduce overtime, and improve first-time fix rates.

This way, tasks get done faster, technicians stay focused, and your team spends more time fixing, not waiting around or doubling up on work.

And while day-to-day efficiency is important, the long-term impact matters, too.

Structured labor planning drives reliability and lowers costs, without sacrificing performance over time.

Turns Maintenance Data Into Smarter Decisions

Real efficiency gains come from visibility—knowing what’s happening across your assets, team, and schedule—and using that information to make better decisions.

That’s exactly what a CMMS makes possible.

The CMMS captures data every time a technician logs a task, completes a work order, or updates an inspection.

Over time, this builds a rich history of asset performance, task durations, failure patterns, and resource use.

All of that data is stored in one searchable platform, rather than being scattered across paper logs or spreadsheets.

This centralized database enables real-time reporting on equipment reliability and team workload to task completion times.

You can track key KPIs, such as PM compliance, backlog size, and the ratio of planned to reactive work, and then monitor their evolution.

According to UpKeep’s previously mentioned report, 28% of maintenance teams say that gaining actionable insights is one of the top benefits of using a CMMS.

For example, if the data shows technicians are spending hours on repeat breakdowns of the same asset, that might justify a full replacement.

Or, if PM tasks are always completed on time but never uncover issues, you can reduce their frequency, saving time without increasing risk.

This continuous feedback loop—measure, adjust, and optimize—drives long-term efficiency.

A CMMS helps you decide when to schedule work, where to assign technicians, how to refine maintenance strategies, and when it’s more cost-effective to repair or replace.

In the end, CMMS doesn’t just digitize maintenance planning and scheduling.

It transforms it by turning everyday tasks into data points, and that data into smarter, faster, and more confident decisions.

Conclusion

Maintenance efficiency is about working smarter at every step of the process, not just fixing assets faster.

From planning preventive tasks to managing parts, labor, and data, a CMMS enables maintenance teams to reduce waste, increase uptime, and deliver better results.

If you still rely on spreadsheets and guesswork, it’s time to upgrade.

Give your team the visibility, control, and confidence they need with a CMMS built for real-world maintenance challenges.