Maintenance history: what it's for

History is the one part of a CMMS you can’t recover afterward. Today’s work orders can be logged tomorrow with some effort; what happened three years ago, if it was never written down, doesn’t exist.

It’s also the part whose value isn’t visible at first. During the first few months it feels like you’re entering information for nothing. The return shows up the day someone asks a question that used to have no answer.

What it stores, exactly

Attached to each asset:

• What was done to it, with date, technician, and outcome.
• How long it took, measured with a timer rather than estimated, with target time, estimated time, and the deviation between planned and actual.
• What material was consumed, with its batch when it has one, and its cost.
• What was checked, in the checklists, with measured values and detected anomalies.
• Before and after photos.
• Who signed, and when.
• Its documentation: manuals, certificates, drawings, with their dates.
• Its meter readings, if it has any.

And also, on the asset record: model, serial number, installation date, cost, warranty end date, location, and whatever custom fields that type of equipment needs.

How it builds up without extra work

This is the part that decides whether the history exists at all.

It isn’t built by spending time documenting. It’s built because logging is a byproduct of normal work: the technician opens the work order in the app, starts the timer, consumes material against the warehouse, fills in the checklist, takes the photos, and collects the signature. By the time it’s closed, the history is already written.

The app works without a connection and syncs when it gets signal back, which isn’t a minor detail: if it required a connection, logging would be postponed to the end of the day and would become a reconstruction from memory. And a reconstruction from memory always has fewer hours and less detail than reality.

The five questions it answers

Repair or replace? The most expensive question in maintenance. With accumulated cost per asset in front of you — hours plus material, over years — it stops being a gut call.

In GMAO CLOUD there’s also an automation for this: on an asset you can log its replacement cost and a warning percentage, and the system notifies you when the accumulated repair spend exceeds that percentage. It doesn’t generate a work order, because replacing a unit is a business decision; it puts the number in front of you at the moment it needs looking at.

Is the frequency set right? An asset that fails between inspections needs a higher frequency; one that never gives problems is probably over-maintained, and that costs money too. Both situations coexist in almost every installation, and without history you can’t tell them apart.

Is this contract profitable? With hours and material charged per client, profitability per contract stops being a guess. There are usually surprises: there’s almost always one type of job that sells for less than it costs.

Was it giving warning signs? If checklists record values instead of checkboxes, a series of readings becomes a trend. You can see that a pump had been getting worse for six months before it broke, and act on it next time.

What exactly happened? When a client makes a claim, when there’s an incident, or when an inspection arrives, what’s requested is a record with date, author, and signature. Legal maintenance rests on exactly this, together with the documentation and its expiry dates.

What makes it reliable

Three things that get appreciated the day they’re needed.

Deletion is logical, not physical. Anything deleted by mistake can be recovered.

A record is kept of who did what. Creation, modification, and deletion, with user and date. In a dispute over whether something was delivered or changed, that’s the difference between an opinion and a fact.

Every job is attributed to whoever did it. This depends on a detail that isn’t obvious: the pricing model. If it’s charged per user, the temptation to share accounts shows up, and as soon as two people sign in with the same user, the history stops holding up as proof. In GMAO CLOUD, licenses are unlimited across all three plans.

Where it’s consulted

Wherever it’s needed, which is almost never an office. In the app, the technician opens the order and has the asset’s history, its documentation, and the anomalies left open from the last visit right in front of them. Many failures are repeats of something already seen, and knowing that before starting is the difference between fixing it and patching it again.

And the client, from their own access portal, looks up their assets along with their history and downloads the report for each intervention without having to ask you for it. Often it’s the first time they’ve seen their own installation laid out in order.

The metrics that come out of it

Aggregated, history stops being a list of interventions and becomes a diagnosis. The reports that pay off the most are four, and none of them exist without prior logging:

Ratio of preventive to corrective hours. Describes better than anything else whether the operation is proactive or reactive. It takes months to move, and that’s exactly why it’s honest.

MTBF, mean time between failures per critical asset: measures reliability.

MTTR, mean time to repair: measures response capability. They’re two different things and shouldn’t be mixed up, because you can repair something very quickly that fails far too often.

Annual plan completion. The honest check of whether the preventive plan actually gets done or just gets drawn up.

A word of caution about all this: it’s meant for sizing, budgeting, and deciding investments, not for watching people. A team that senses the system exists to monitor them stops feeding it accurately, and at that point the history stops being worth anything.

What to do with old history

The question that stops many people from implementing. The short answer: almost nothing.

Migrating years of paper work orders is expensive and pays off little, because what actually gets consulted is recent history. What is worth bringing over is the asset inventory with installation dates, warranties, and current documentation, which is what gives context from day one.

History builds up going forward. In twelve months there’s enough to start deciding with data; in three years, enough that you won’t want to go back.

If you’d like to see how it would look with your equipment, you can request a demo.