The problem some of us (Maintenance) suffer is when the descision comes from high corporate for a system that is BOB for Finance, Sales/Distribution, or for manufacturing planning, but it has at the same time a lemon for Maintenance Module.

Even if the CEO, CFO, or VP who said the last word recognize it will be harder for Maintenance to do our job with a new system he/she see things at a wide level and conclude: more departments will gain from the new system, sorry Maintenance deal with it.

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

Hello Eugen,

I am too young to this forum and just did my first attempt to change something in our organization so can't b an expert to comment, but these are my views.

I do not think that when a person reach position of CEO he become insane and does not have concern to make asset runs better! If this is so the organization will go down the drain in any case (there by there is no need for CMMS).

From my understanding of having seen few business cycles (You know that India was closed economy once upon a time, so i know exactly how global competition hurts). In new world where competition is with an unknown manufacturer from an unknown country, it is always the financial competition at best quality between you and your competitor make the business succeed. It drives you to become more innovative in running business.
Market doesn’t care how old the system we are running and how much we spend on maintaining asset. {(Top-line) – (bottom-line) = profit.}

If we can't justify anything either by increasing Top-line or by reducing bottom-line we can't contribute in decision making. So instead of making discussion regarding Best-Of- Breed or ERP, we should only reduce 90% cost item and 90% activities that breeds inefficiency and define KPI that helps changing the paradigm.

Maintenance department can contribute in both term Quality and Cost, so there is no need to get upset about these financial systems.

Decision making point should always be $ value added in Profit with highest quality.

Regards

What I can say from my experience is that VIP from up there sees this type of descisions like:

Option 1:
* One system to satisfy all sites / department needs.
*** Majority of departments satisfied with the system, Maintenance complaining the new Maintenance Module is not as good as current system.
* Only one software supplier to deal with (license costs, support contract, etc.)
* Reports of all sites comes from the same software, in the same format.

Option 2:
* Two information systems, two software companies to deal with
*** Maintenance is happy since they can continue to use the current system.
*** Maintenance and Purchasing (MRO) in one system
** Finance and Inventory Control in the other
** Finance having a lot of work to produce the financial reports since budgets are in one system while Maintenance (the big expenses)dragged Purchasing to the other.

* Additional custom programming to interphase one system with the other. (costs not present at option 1).
** Each time one of the two software companies send a upgrade-support- package the interfases needs to be verified and possibly reprogrammed. (additional programming costs).
* Two sets of reports received or additional effort to produce the reports integrating data from two systems.

Option 1 is efficient, Option 2 is a mess.

The CEO asks the CFO: As CFO and head of IS / IT department what do you recommends?

Thanks to all for the responses. Some good suggestions here. I'm not afraid of change and I'm all in favor of a fully integrated system (our CMMS is partially integrated with the ERP now) but I don't see why we should have to take steps backward - not even temporarily. Thanks again.