I have experienced the pains of developing a CMMS in MS Access as well as trying to make one work out of the box. We had to spend almost a year of my time trying to make Access do what we needed to get started (I'm not a developer). Once we got a start our customer liked what we had but understood the deficiencies. They then paid a developer to come in and fix all the problems for another 8 months. I am now trying to impliment Maximo at a different site with limited IT support and only the reports and abilities it has out of the box. We are 6 months into our pilot and feel we are just now ready to move implimentation to other portions of our contract. If I had to choose between the two I would take any CMMS product over building a database from scratch.

I too have experienced the pains of developing a CMMS in MS Access but thankfully came out of it with a system that suited my every need. Prior to me becoming a maintenance manager my company had used Shire (DOS version) and then purchased Shire (Windows multi user version). It had never been used or installed until I trailed it. I was very disappointed with it, my colleague who was instrumental in buying it told me that it was sold as being adaptable and changeable to our own designs. This was not the case and to me it appears to be aimed at companies that run their maintenance departments like call centres. My Maintenance department does not run like that and that’s not how I want to run my department. That was when I decided to create my own CMMS using MS Access. It was implement earlier this year and has worked perfectly, it holds almost 3000 plant assets, is used by over 40 engineers and 150 requisition within a large company. Because it has been created from scratch I have been able to have tools such as "Locate Engineer" built into the system. It has worked so well for me that I have now started my own company and will be launching my CMMS in January 2007. So in conclusion, although I agree with most of the previous comments, if you are a good manager who knows how work orders and PMs etc should flow and up for the challenge the rewards outweigh the pain.

Garry the CMMS market place is flooded with systems so it will not be easy for you unless your system has something special. If you would like me to have a look at it get in touch.

bweir@pemms.co.uk
www.pemms.co.uk

Thanx for the offer, I am about 1 month off completion of the software, what i can do is email several screen shot to demonstrate what i consider to be what makes this diffeent.
Regards
Garry