What a plant needs from maintenance software that a building does not

Maintenance software written for buildings will run a factory badly, and the reasons are specific. A plant schedules by production time rather than by calendar, measures loss against output, and cannot open a machine whenever it likes. Five requirements follow from that.

1. Schedules that count running hours and cycles, not days

A press that ran two shifts last month and one this month does not need servicing on the same date. Any product for a plant must schedule on a meter reading, on a calendar, and on whichever comes first. If it only does calendars, you will maintain half your machines too early and half too late.

2. Downtime recorded against the line, at the line

Downtime written on paper at the machine and typed up on Friday is a guess by Friday. The record has to be made where it happens, in seconds, with a reason code short enough that an operator will pick the true one rather than the first one.

3. Work that fits a window somebody else controls

In a building you can usually work when you like. In a plant you get a changeover, a weekend or a shutdown. Software that cannot hold a bank of jobs ready to release into a window, in priority order, will not survive contact with a planner.

4. Critical spares tied to the asset, not to a stores list

The question during a breakdown is never "what is in stores". It is "what does this machine need and do we have it". If the parts list hangs off the asset, that takes ten seconds. If it does not, somebody walks to the storeroom.

5. A path from the fault to the cause

Plants get value from asking why the same machine keeps stopping. That needs failure history recorded consistently enough to sort by, which in practice means a short, fixed list of causes rather than a free text box. Twelve options that get used beat sixty that do not.

The thing that is usually oversold

Condition monitoring and vibration analysis are genuinely useful and rarely the first problem. If preventive work is slipping and nobody knows which machine is the worst actor, sensors will produce a stream of data into the same gap. Fix the record first, then instrument the equipment the record says is hurting you.