This is not a sales vehicle Jesus. Please don't use it as such.

My experience has been that companies that develop their own end up spending a lot more time/money developing and maintaining their home-grown CMMS and usually don't end up with as useful of a product than by simply purchasing one outright from a CMMS vendor. If you need customization some companies provide this at a substanial cost. CMMS that are fully customizable (i.e. define all fields, data tables, etc. usually sacrifice analysis features and power, take a bit of thought and time to customize, etc. My opinion is find a CMMS that is semi-customizable i.e. all literal text may be changed. This would include the cappability to customized all label, menus, and other literal text in the program as well as on all reports generated by the program. This is required if you need a multi-lingual CMMS too.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: MaintSmartCMMS,

The only advantage of creating your own system is that you have complete control of how it works.

If you are the type of person that loves to be in control, then go ahead and do the development.

For the rest of us that are out to save money in our operations, buy a software package. Leave the headaches, development, and support to the vendor.

We're in the business of maintenance-- not in the business of software.

M

quote:

Originally posted by CRS:
Are there any opinions out there about using microsoft Access to manage maintenance processes for smaller to medium sized companies? We are currently waffling between a purchased out of the box system versus developing our own with our in house programmer. Any information or comments from people with past experience going down this road with a customized MS Access approach would be appreciated.

My two cents opinion:
Define your requirements, go out analyze available packages, check reviews at magazines or these forums, select the best option already made, customize to suit your particular needs.

If I interpreted the comments so far the opinions favor purchasing a real CMMS vs creating a MS Access 8 to 1.

I completly aggree with the comments to buy an existings CMMS instead of building a new one.
The most important thing is that you need to know your requirements. Try to keep them small as each requirement will cause a lot of work (not only in the implementation).
Next try to make a time line and place your requirements on it. This will help to get your CMMS starting up very fast.

And if you want to develop your own CMMS forget ACCESS if you have more than one or two users. I have seen a lot of ACCESS based systems which had problems with larger DB's (the problem is not only the size, but also the amount of data which changes). We put some of them on SQL server and since that time they run fine.