CMMS for medical equipment maintenance companies

A company that maintains medical equipment — biomedical engineering, sterilization, imaging, laboratory — works in a demanding setting: the assets aren’t theirs, they’re spread across different customer sites, they carry serial-number traceability, and any intervention may need to be justified.

On top of that, a failure doesn’t cost production: it costs patient care, and that compresses the timelines.

The equipment belongs to the customer, and you need to know which is which

The first thing the system has to solve: a fleet of assets that belongs to third parties and is distributed across sites.

In asset management each piece of equipment hangs off its customer and its site, with its model, its serial number, its installation date, its warranty end date, its location within the site and its priority. Plus whatever custom fields each family needs, each with its own unit.

The serial number isn’t an administrative field here: it’s the key to traceability. The entire history — interventions, parts replaced, verifications, incidents — hangs off that specific unit, not the model.

They’re grouped by family and model, which is what lets you define a protocol once for a type of equipment and apply it to the fifty units you have spread across different hospitals.

The contract is the plan

You don’t decide the preventive maintenance schedule: the contract does, and often the manufacturer too.

The checklist of checks is linked to the equipment, its model or its family, the schedule is defined, and preventive maintenance generates the work orders on its own, with technician and date, checking beforehand whether the day is a holiday and whether that person is available.

The same piece of equipment can carry several schedules at once: the quarterly verification is one thing and the annual review with component replacement is another.

And when wear tracks usage — an autoclave’s cycles, a device’s hours — the asset can carry a counter with a limit and a warning percentage, so the preventive order generates automatically once the threshold is exceeded.

Deadlines, which here are measured

A piece of equipment down in a hospital has an impact on patient care, so response times are often contractually committed.

Incidents carry their type and subtype, priority, the customer, the site and the affected equipment, and statuses can have a maximum time attached. There’s also an SLA entity with its name, priority and limit, and incident times are logged.

That means anything overdue shows up on a list before the customer complains, and lets you later measure response time and resolution time separately, the two figures that get audited.

Alerts can come in from the backend, from customer access with a description and photo, or from an email inbox that the system converts into incidents.

Verifications with values

In biomedical engineering, a report isn’t worth what it says — it’s worth what it measures.

Checklists support fields with their type, label and minimum and maximum value, so an out-of-range reading is logged as an anomaly on the spot. And on preventive orders the app won’t let you close it until the checklist has been filled in.

Those values, accumulated per unit, are what let you see a piece of equipment drifting before a verification actually fails.

The technician, at the customer’s site

Working in equipment rooms, basements and shielded rooms, where signal fails, with the customer standing right there.

The app stores orders, assets and documents on the device itself and queues up actions taken offline; if one fails to sync, it’s flagged with the reason. On the order the technician has that specific unit’s history and documentation, logs time with a timer, consumes material from the warehouse — including their van, if you register it as its own warehouse — and collects the signature of the person responsible for the service.

That signed report is what backs the invoice and what gets shown when someone disputes whether the visit happened.

Parts, with their traceability

In this sector what matters isn’t just what was replaced, but which specific unit was fitted.

Items that need it are managed by batch, with their code, manufacturing date and expiry date, and consumption is logged when the order is closed, so it stays linked to the intervention, the equipment and the date.

The item’s original reference is also what lets you find the equivalent when the manufacturer’s part has a long lead time, which is common in medical equipment.

The documentation that gets handed over

Verification certificates, intervention reports, manufacturer protocols, declarations and contracts.

The document manager attaches them to the equipment, the customer, the provider or the order, decides who sees them — customer, technician, provider — or whether they require validation, and gives them an expiry date with a daily check on what’s about to expire and its corresponding notification. Certificates carry their number, scope, issuer and holder.

To be precise: the system records and demonstrates what was done. Whoever answers to the standard is the company and the site owner. No software certifies anything.

Letting the customer see it

A large share of the calls a maintenance company receives don’t ask for anything: they ask when someone’s coming, or for the report from the last visit.

With their own dedicated access, the person responsible for the service sees the status of their orders, downloads the report for each intervention and checks the upcoming preventive maintenance for their equipment, letting them plan room access without anyone having to call them. Since licenses are unlimited across all three plans, giving access to the whole portfolio costs nothing extra.

What to look at next

The reports on annual plan execution per contract, response and resolution times by priority, hours per customer, and cost per unit.

And the deviation between estimated and actual time, which usually reveals which type of contract is being sold below cost.

There’s more on managing contracts in third-party maintenance. If you want to see it with one of your own contracts, you can request a demo.