The software that runs most maintenance departments
CMMS stands for Computerised Maintenance Management System. It manages work orders, equipment records, preventive maintenance schedules, and parts inventory. Grand View Research valued the global CMMS market at $1.03 billion in 2023 with a projected growth rate of 8.8 percent annually through 2030. Plant Engineering's 2022 survey found that 54 percent of US manufacturing plants use some form of CMMS — up from 38 percent in 2015.
What a CMMS does well
Aberdeen Group found that plants using a CMMS achieved on average 19 percent lower maintenance costs and 17 percent higher equipment availability than plants without one. The primary driver: the ability to execute a planned PM programme consistently. The CMMS triggers PM tasks and tracks completion, preventing the schedule from deteriorating under day-to-day operational pressure.
This is the foundation of what SMRP calls the planned maintenance ratio — the single most actionable metric a maintenance organisation can track. A CMMS is the tool that makes that ratio measurable.
The moment a CMMS fails its users
The same Aberdeen Group study found that 43 percent of CMMS users were dissatisfied with their system's usefulness during fault diagnosis. Work order records that capture what was done but not why provide limited diagnostic value. A work order recording "replaced pump" does not help the next technician facing the same fault — unless it also captures what symptoms were observed, what was checked, and what the root cause was determined to be.
The CMMS user experience during a fault incident — the moment of highest need — is frequently the weakest point. Navigation under time pressure, poor search functionality, and sparse resolution notes combine to make calling a colleague faster than using the system.
The capability gap that AI diagnostic systems fill
A CMMS records maintenance activity. It does not diagnose faults. It does not search machine manuals. It does not surface relevant past resolutions when a technician is standing in front of a failed machine. These are the functions that AI maintenance diagnostic systems provide. The two categories are complementary — a CMMS manages the workflow; an AI diagnostic system provides the knowledge at the moment of need.
This is exactly the gap YAFEX fills. When a technician faces an Allen-Bradley fault code or a bearing failure they have not seen before, YAFEX searches your work order history and machine manuals simultaneously — returning the answer in under 4 minutes.
What to look for in a CMMS that actually gets used
SMRP's Best Practices guide identifies criteria that correlate with maintenance programme success: intuitive work order creation on mobile devices from the plant floor, real-time storeroom inventory against parts required for a job, and search functionality that returns relevant historical work orders by equipment and fault type rather than requiring the user to know the work order number or date.
YAFEX works alongside your CMMS — adding AI-powered fault diagnosis and documentation search. Talk to us about how they work together.
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