A CMMS tailored to you: what can be adapted

“Tailored” is one of those phrases used to sell very different things. Sometimes it means the system can be configured without touching code; sometimes it means there’s a development team behind it and an invoice for every change.

The difference matters because it determines the cost of the next five years. Here’s what can actually be adapted in GMAO Cloud without development, and where the line sits.

The asset record: custom fields

The data that describes a boiler isn’t the data that describes an elevator, a treadmill or a van. A system that forces everything into the “observations” field ends up with free text nobody can filter.

In asset management you define custom fields with their own type and unit, on top of the standard ones — model, serial number, installation date, cost, warranty end date, location, priority. Power output, flow rate, number of stops, payload, filter surface area: each type of equipment gets what it needs.

And assets are grouped by system, family and model, which isn’t a decorative classification: it’s what lets almost everything else be configured once for many pieces of equipment.

Checks, by family and in cascade

This is the point that sets systems apart the most, and the one least often asked about in a demo.

Checklists are defined with their fields, label, type and — where relevant — their minimum and maximum value, so an out-of-range reading is logged as an anomaly on the spot.

And they resolve in cascade: if the specific asset doesn’t have its own, the system looks at its model, then its subfamily, then its family. The practical result: two hundred identical pieces of equipment get configured once, and you only fine-tune the ones with something particular about them. The difference from configuring equipment one by one is weeks of work.

Schedules

A single asset can carry several schedules at once — the monthly check is one thing and the annual one with parts replacement is another — each one tracking when it was last carried out.

And not everything is measured in months. An asset can carry a counter — hours, cycles, mileage — with a limit and a warning percentage: when a logged reading exceeds the threshold, the preventive order generates automatically. The sensible approach is to combine both: time-based for what degrades whether or not it’s in use, counter-based for what wears out through use.

Statuses, which are the company’s own vocabulary

Every organization names things its own way and has its own workflow. A system that imposes five fixed statuses forces everyone to mentally translate them every day.

Statuses for incidents and work orders are configurable, and each one can carry:

• Its maximum time, so overdue items show up on a list.
• Its associated email, so a status change notifies only the person concerned.
• Its visibility: what the customer sees and what stays internal.
• The don’t notify flag, just as important as the opposite: alerting on every internal movement turns notifications into noise and people stop reading them.

Incident types and subtypes are also configurable, along with SLAs with their priority and limit.

Who sees what

Permissions by role, and the visibility of each document in the document manager: whether the customer, technician or provider sees it, and whether it requires validation.

That turns a decision that repeats over and over — what do I show this person — into a setup done once.

Where work comes in

You can configure where it comes from: the backend, customer access with a description and photo, or an email inbox that the system empties and converts into incidents, with a separate inbox per type where useful.

Pricing and rates

You can define item rates with their percentage or fixed amount, discounts by family and customer, and provider-specific prices with their agreed discount and reference, so the agreed percentage applies automatically when generating a purchase order.

And integration

Whatever isn’t in the catalog gets solved through the general-purpose routes: a public REST API, SOAP, direct database access, and CSV and FTP exchange. In practice, it’s the most flexible form of “tailored” there is: your own development reading from and writing to the CMMS.

Integrations lists the scope of each connector, which isn’t the same for all of them.

Where the line sits

Being upfront about this saves the awkward conversation in month three.

There’s no visual report builder. What exists is a catalog of more than sixty reports with filters and export, plus a dashboard. If you need your own dashboards, the way to get them is connecting your BI tool via API or SQL, which also lets you cross the data with production or billing.

There’s no “legal maintenance module.” Legal maintenance is achieved with the preventive maintenance mechanism, by linking the checklist the regulation requires and its schedule. It’s more flexible than a closed vertical, but it’s worth knowing.

Business logic isn’t rewritten from configuration. If you need an approval workflow that doesn’t exist, that’s development, and it should be treated as such: with its own scope, cost and ongoing maintenance.

The question you need to ask

In any demo, including ours: what happens when I need something that isn’t there today. There are three possible answers, and it’s worth knowing which one you’re getting.

That it can be configured — great. That it will be added to the product in a future release — reasonable, if there’s a commitment behind it. Or that it’s billable development — legitimate, but it needs to go into next year’s budget, not just this one.

Be wary of anyone who says yes to everything without distinguishing between the three.

Where to start

Not by configuring everything on day one. With the critical assets, their families, their maintenance plans and schedules, there’s already enough for the system to start working. Custom fields, fine-grained statuses and rates get fine-tuned once there’s real usage, which is when you actually know what you need.

If you want to see what would be configured in your case, you can request a demo.