We have been studying how much influence the plant maintenance management and staff have on CMMS and EAM selection and implementation. The feedback seems to indicate that IT and Finance/Accounting have the most influence on selection and implementation. How much influence does maintenance have on Maintenance Software at your plant?

Terrence, in my experience maintenance departments are seldom allowed to play the leading role in CMMS software selection. At the lower end of the market, in smaller companies, where there may just be a single user system involved the maintenance person often makes the purchase without consulting the IT department. This is often because smaller companies do not have IT departments

In larger organisations where systems must be installed on company network servers involvement from the IT group becomes a necessity. In these situations they tend to dominate the decision making process. "It must be a SQL server system!", "It must be Windows NT!", blah de blah de blah

Many readers will be familiar with this situation. IT departments tend to have the upper hand because they control what is installed on the servers and senior management will seldom overule them in favour of a maintenance manager.

Maintenance chose our first CMMS on this site in about 1997. However as part of our coporate strategy we are being transfered to SAP soon which is more to do with aligning all parts of the company on one system.

Our first and only CMMS was installed in 1994. In 1993 the Maintenance department was shopping for a CMMS. At our plants, stores and procurement is part of the Financial directorate. We selected Rapier and Stores/Procurement joined the decision.
In their opinion it was a stores management system. The IT Department was just newcommer on the block, so they had no vote, they had to support ( good old times)
Now we are 10 years further, Rapier has been bought by Datastream and is now Datastream 7i

We have seen some upgrades (Now IT department is King) Rapier 4.1 - Rapier 5 (because of Y2k) - MP5 - Datastream7i

My opinion, Datastream is to stay, but IT will decide when to ugrade

Terrence I think you are on to something here. I have spent the past 8 years developing my own CMMS because I did not like any of the Of The Shelf Products. Now that I have a very reliable system I am starting to look around at commercial software and organizational use/failures. The problem as I see it is that upper level management drives these CMMS implementations and the developer's look to make their product appealing to upper level management. I consider my CMMS a success because the workforce likes it. I look around outside my little world I see failed implementation because the workers despise the CMMS because it has no value to them. The workforce sees it as management tools to micro manage them. I also see the same thing in the CMMS software; it's a management tool only. It was not designed for the people who do the maintenance and repair.