Research Manager, Enterprise Asset Management and Smart Facilities for IDC
Research Director, Provider IT Transformation Strategies
Research Manager, IDC Worldwide Education Digital Transformation Strategies
Major Players
Accruent
Dude Solutions
FMX
Fiix
Fluke
SpaceIQ
Leaders
NuvoloFeatured Vendor
Planon
UpKeep
iOFFICE
The intent behind a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) is to automate, improve, and ultimately anticipate maintenance needs. This IDC MarketScape helps organizations evaluate the CMMS application market landscape. It is a competitive market, and buyers have their pick of vendors.
From the product perspective, any system an organization considers should have reactive, planned, and condition-based maintenance capabilities. Depending upon how you will use the system, IDC suggests looking at additional functionality for spare part inventory, vendor management, work scheduling, inspections, and reporting. Organizations must also think about key areas that distinguish SaaS CMMS application vendors today, which are relationship building, configurability, mobility, location intelligence, predictive maintenance, and vision.
SaaS turns a CMMS software deployment into a multiyear relationship. Purchase decision makers should look for a vendor that feels as much a cultural fit for their organization as a technical fit. Many customer references talk about whether they trust the vendor to deliver on their promises and provide the best experiences. Some end users expressed delight with the little things that their customer success manager does for them or when a random feature that they requested shows up on the product road map. Often, it comes down to the commitment and expertise of the vendors’ staff, how they guide customers during and after implementation to avoid common pitfalls, and the way they treat customers when it’s time for renegotiating contracts.
Applications should readily conform to an organization’s workflows, nomenclature, and roles. Organizations should have the ability to quickly modify existing fields, add new fields, and rearrange fields on different views, as well as report on custom data points. Further, a modern CMMS provides mechanisms for altering out-of-the-box workflows, such as defining approval processes, generating email alerts, and sending invoices to a financial application. Purchase decision makers should evaluate how much can be configured via the user interface or low-code tools without writing custom code. When a system is truly configurable, all customers can be on the same code base, but still have the product work the way they want. Otherwise, organizations end up adjusting procedures to fit a rigid application or paying ongoing professional services fees to customize and maintain workarounds. In fact, these are two of the main reasons customers gave for being dissatisfied with a CMMS application.
Mobile is increasingly important because technicians want to complete everything onsite and not have to return to a desk at the end of the day to key in data. Further, the COVID-19 pandemic imposed physical restrictions that quickly drove organizations to more remote maintenance operations. Five years ago, most customers wanted a simple mobile maintenance app for technicians to open, assign, and close work. Now technicians want the option to do almost everything they can do on a computer on a mobile device as well, but still have it be easy to use. Initially, this favors vendors that mobile enabled their SaaS product for access on any device because new features are automatically available. Greater investment in mobile experiences will be a strategic imperative for vendors in this area as more and more activities go remote.
One emerging frontier is the integration between maintenance systems and location-related external data and location intelligence analytics. Knowing and using the location of a technician, asset, work order, or issue adds rich context to the preservation of physical assets and equipment. Potential digital transformation use cases include assigning work to the nearest technician, tracking the location where an asset is deployed, and overlaying 3D models with real-time location information. For example, technicians can use an indoor wayfinding to navigate to points of interest or geospatial visualizations to understand areas impacted by outages or natural disasters. There are exciting possibilities but also challenges with privacy and cultural acceptance. Organizations will want to harness the promise of location intelligence while not letting the potential get ahead of the practical.
Many vendors promote predictive maintenance when they actually deliver what IDC classifies as condition-based maintenance. With condition-based maintenance, companies can monitor certain real-time data from IoT endpoints, such as runtime, temperature, or pressure. Then the maintenance team defines rules to automatically trigger work orders when data is outside acceptable thresholds. This delivers significant productivity gains for organizations still relying on reactive and time-based planned maintenance and is a valuable step in advancing maintenance operations. Predictive maintenance goes to the next level and applies artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to a range of historic and live data points to create models. Maintenance software then anticipates events such as when equipment is likely to fail, downtime may occur, or spare parts will run out. Going one step further, vendors are exploring making recommendations or automating actions based on predictive models. This is certainly an area to watch as CMMS vendors take a page from enterprise asset management (EAM) application providers already making inroads in predictive maintenance.
This IDC MarketScape evaluates the vendors, not just their products. CMMS vendors are fairly close together on their capabilities but vary on their strategies (refer back to Figure 1). Some are effectively leveraging partnerships and a broader ecosystem to bring more value to customers, while others are building predictive analytics, doubling down on IoT, or updating their cloud architecture and delivery. The road maps and strategies shared with IDC demonstrated a wide range of what vendors believe customers will prioritize in the future. A product road map is a set of commitments to customers and a statement about where the software provider is focusing its energy. While many vendors are hitting on a few key areas, only some are pulling it all together in a comprehensive and compelling vision. This is one differentiator between vendors in the Major Player versus Leader category.
CMMS applications are evolving rapidly as vendors invest research and development dollars into bolstering, augmenting and, in some cases, redesigning their software. As a result, it is extremely important for end users to understand how vendors and their software are positioned currently as well as how a CMMS may be situated in the next three to five years. Organizations typically make a multiyear commitment to their CMMS applications because the investment to migrate the data, configure workflows, integrate with adjacent systems, and train a broad user base is high. Thus it is vital to evaluate the software vendor’s strategy, road map, and responsiveness to customer feedback in addition to the vendor’s present features and functionality.
Innovation is an essential part of the “buy” decision, so a guiding factor in our vendor research was the 3rd Platform and innovation accelerator current capabilities in addition to the strategic direction. Buyers are looking for a technology partner that can rise to the complex, agile, and remote demands of today, as well as take them into the future. Several vendors outlined in this study have focused their CMMS on specific manufacturing and industrial verticals, while others serve organizations across many industries such as healthcare, education, and public sector clients. The vendors vary in terms of size, experience, levels of support, sales model, and focus on the market. Ultimately, it is about finding the vendor that best suits your needs, sets reasonable expectations, and delivers on them with professionalism and accountability.
Following are a few key steps in the journey to select the right fit among the myriad of software vendors:
This IDC MarketScape vendor assessment assists in answering the aforementioned questions and others. The goal of this document is to provide potential software customers with a list of CMMS vendors that have taken great strides to incorporate the previously listed capabilities. We have profiled and assessed their capabilities and strategies to support the broad needs of a CMMS application.
This section briefly explains IDC’s key observations resulting in a vendor’s position in the IDC MarketScape. While every vendor is evaluated against each of the criteria outlined in the Appendix, the description here provides a summary of each vendor’s strengths and challenges.
After a thorough evaluation of Nuvolo’s strategies and capabilities, IDC has positioned the company in the Leaders category in this IDC MarketScape for worldwide SaaS computerized maintenance management system applications.
Nuvolo, founded in 2014, automates work order management, preventative maintenance, spare parts inventory, and inspections. Nuvolo has capabilities to manage vendors, warranties, and regulatory compliance across a variety of industries, especially healthcare, life sciences, and food retail. Nuvolo offers a configurable application, which includes mobile technician and field service management functionality for workload balancing, scheduling, and route optimization. In addition, Nuvolo enables live asset tracking and extends its CMMS capabilities with OT cybersecurity for protecting connected non-IT devices. Nuvolo’s application is a single system and code base, built from the ground up on ServiceNow’s NOW platform. Nuvolo received Series C funding in March 2021 and is investing in product development, expanding its staff and offices globally, and partnerships with Deloitte, Accenture, and Fujitsu.
Quick facts about Nuvolo are as follows:
Consider Nuvolo if you are a large enterprise or midmarket business. You are likely looking for a configurable CMMS with field service management capabilities. You might also consider Nuvolo if you are already using ServiceNow.
The vendor inclusion list for this evaluation was selected to accurately depict the vendors that are most representative of any given CMMS application on buyer’s selection list based on the following:
For the purposes of this analysis, IDC divided potential key measures for success into two primary categories: capabilities and strategies.
Positioning on the y-axis reflects the vendor’s current capabilities and menu of services and how well aligned the vendor is to customer needs. The capabilities category focuses on the capabilities of the company and product today, here and now. Under this category, IDC analysts will look at how well a vendor is building/delivering capabilities that enable it to execute its chosen strategy in the market.
Positioning on the x-axis, or strategies axis, indicates how well the vendor’s future strategy aligns with what customers will require in three to five years. The strategies category focuses on high-level decisions and underlying assumptions about offerings, customer segments, and business and go-to-market plans for the next three to five years.
The size of the individual vendor markers in the IDC MarketScape represents the market share of each individual vendor within the specific market segment being assessed.
IDC MarketScape criteria selection, weightings, and vendor scores represent well-researched IDC judgment about the market and specific vendors. IDC analysts tailor the range of standard characteristics by which vendors are measured through structured discussions, surveys, and interviews with market leaders, participants, and end users. Market weightings are based on user interviews, buyer surveys, and the input of IDC experts in each market. IDC analysts base individual vendor scores, and ultimately vendor positions on the IDC MarketScape, on detailed surveys and interviews with the vendors, publicly available information, and end-user experiences in an effort to provide an accurate and consistent assessment of each vendor’s characteristics, behavior, and capability.
A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) manages an organization’s maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) operations for its physical assets and equipment. A CMMS application often includes capabilities to digitally automate work order management, reactive maintenance, preventative maintenance, inspections, spare parts inventory management, vendor management, and warranty tracking.
