What a CMMS really costs, and what moves the number

Most CMMS products are priced per user per month, roughly 20 to 100 US dollars for somebody who plans and reports. That range is wide because it is measuring different things. The total you pay is decided by four items that rarely appear on the pricing page.

The four items that move the total

• •Implementation and setup, sometimes a flat fee, sometimes a multiple of the first year
• •Getting your existing data in: asset lists, schedules, open jobs, history
• •Whether the people in the field need a paid seat, and what a light seat can do
• •How the price steps when you add buildings, sites or a second company

Count your seats honestly before you compare

Vendors quote against the number you give them, so give the same number to everybody. Count these separately: people who assign and report, people who complete work, contractors, and people who only raise requests.

The last group is the one to watch. If every tenant, teacher or shop manager who reports a leak needs a licence, your cost is tied to your headcount rather than to your maintenance programme. Requests from named-but-unlicensed people should be free, and in most good products they are.

The cost nobody puts in the business case

Time to first useful day. A system that is live in three weeks and a system that is live in seven months cost the same on paper and nothing like the same in practice, because the second one spends half a year of somebody’s attention and often loses its sponsor before it launches.

How to build a number you can defend

Do not lead with efficiency percentages. Nobody believes them and they are impossible to verify afterwards. Use costs you already have.

• •One emergency callout that a preventive check would have caught, times how many happened last year
• •The hours somebody spends assembling evidence before each audit or insurance visit
• •Overtime spent on work that was scheduled but slipped
• •One piece of equipment replaced early because its service history was lost

Four real numbers from your own site beat any industry statistic, and they survive the question "where did that come from", which the industry statistic will not.

What to negotiate, and what not to

Negotiate the implementation fee, the length of the first term and the price of the second building. Do not negotiate away the training or the data import to get the headline rate down. Those are the two things that decide whether anybody uses it.