A CMMS rollout that finishes: the first ninety days

Most CMMS rollouts stall in the same place: three months into cleaning an asset list, with nothing live, and the sponsor losing interest. The fix is to put real work on a real phone in the second week and let the data catch up around it.

Weeks 1 and 2: one building, one round, one crew

Load the equipment for one building only. Not the whole estate. Build the single inspection round you would least like to be audited on, and give it to the crew that walks it.

You will get the important discoveries in the first four days: the plant room nobody had on a list, the step everybody skips, the place with no signal. All of these are cheap to find now and expensive to find in month five.

Weeks 3 to 6: reactive work, and the request path

Move incoming problems next, because that is what makes the system the place people look. Put a code on the wall so anybody can report a fault without an account, and turn on the message that tells them when it is fixed.

This is the step that changes the culture. When reporting something takes twenty seconds and produces a reply, people stop mentioning faults in corridors, and the corridor is where your work was disappearing.

Weeks 7 to 10: the preventive schedule, pruned

Do not import the old schedule. Print it, sit down with the two people who know the buildings best, and go line by line.

• •Delete work for equipment that no longer exists
• •Merge rounds that visit the same plant room twice in a week
• •Move anything that has passed forty times in a row to a longer interval
• •Shorten anything that has failed twice

Most schedules lose a fifth of their volume to this and become achievable for the first time in years. Importing an unachievable schedule teaches everyone on day one that the dates are fiction.

Weeks 11 to 13: the second building, and the report

Only now add a second site, and only now build the report anybody sees. The report should be one number, late preventive work by building, on the screen people open in the morning. Everything else can wait a quarter.

What to refuse for the whole ninety days

• •Custom fields requested by somebody who will not be using the system
• •A full history import from the old system, which nobody has ever read afterwards
• •Integrations, unless a job cannot be completed without one
• •A big-bang training day for everybody at once

The signal that it worked

At ninety days, ask somebody outside the team to name where they would report a broken door. If they know, without being told, the rollout has landed. If they say "I would tell Dave", you have installed software next to the old system rather than in place of it.