Maintenance: the CMMS
Assets, work orders, preventive and corrective maintenance, spare parts, and history. This is the part GMAO Cloud covers, and usually the one that concentrates the most operating spend.
Facility management
Facility management is not one single thing
Under the same name you find building maintenance, space management, people services, and expense control. Mixing them up is why so many tools promise to cover everything and none of them do.
Who this page is for
For anyone evaluating tools who needs to know what they're comparing. If you already know you need to manage maintenance for facilities — your own or your clients' — the page for maintenance and services companies gets straight to the point. This one explains the full map and where each piece fits.
Why it's so hard to compare
Because every vendor calls facility management whatever it is they do.
- A space-management product and a maintenance product get sold with the same words.
- Demos show what the product does well, not what you actually need.
- Feature lists all look the same because they were written to look the same.
- Nobody says what it does NOT do, so you find out after signing.
- And the phrase "all-in-one platform" shows up everywhere without meaning anything.
The pieces of facility management
Telling them apart is half the work of choosing.
Space: the CAFM
Square footage, occupancy, desks, moves, room booking. It's a different product category, and GMAO Cloud doesn't cover it.
People services
Cleaning, security, reception, catering, gardening. These are recurring services that get scheduled and proven like any other work.
Spend and contracts
What each building and each service costs, and whether vendor contracts are delivering what they promised.
Building compliance
The mandatory regulatory checks on the facility, and documented proof that they were done.
Energy and sustainability
Consumption and efficiency. It's its own discipline, with its own tools, that relies on maintenance but isn't the same thing.
CMMS, CAFM, and FM software
A CMMS manages maintenance: what assets exist, what's done to them, who does it, and with what. A CAFM manages space: square footage, occupancy, desks, and people movement inside the building. And "facility management software" is a commercial umbrella term that, depending on who's saying it, means one, the other, or both at varying depth. The useful question isn't which of the three you need, it's which problem is costing you money today: if it's that you don't know what's been done at your facilities or what each one costs, your problem is a CMMS problem. If it's that you don't know how many free desks you have on the third floor, it isn't.
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What GMAO Cloud doesn't do
It doesn't manage space: no floor plans with occupancy, no desk assignment, no room booking, no move management. It's not an energy-management tool. And it doesn't try to be a suite covering all of facility management, because suites that promise that usually do one thing well and the rest halfway. What it does do — and it's half the operating budget for most FM teams — is maintenance: the facilities, the equipment, the planned work, the work that comes in unannounced, the vendors who carry it out, and the cost of all of it.
The service agreement as a way to structure operations
In facility management the contract isn't measured in interventions but in commitments: maximum response time, resolution time, availability of certain spaces or equipment. That way of contracting changes what needs to be recorded, and most operations find that out too late. The work order date alone isn't enough: you need the moment the request came in, the moment someone attended to it, and the moment it was resolved, each with its actual time. With those three data points, compliance calculates itself and stops being a monthly negotiation over perceptions. Without them, the worst outcome happens for both sides: whoever provides the service can't prove what they delivered, and whoever pays for it can't demand what's missing, so the relationship gets decided by whoever pushes harder.
Space as an asset, not just the equipment
One practical difference between industrial and building maintenance is what counts as the management unit. In a plant, it's the machine; in a building, it's often the space: a meeting room, an office floor, a restroom, a common area. A fault gets described by location before equipment — "the AC isn't working in room three" — and investment decisions get made by space too. Structuring the inventory so the space exists as its own entity, with equipment hanging off it, lets you answer the questions people actually ask: how much does it cost to maintain this floor, which zone concentrates the complaints, which area would justify a renovation. If everything hangs directly off the building, those questions have no answer.
Frequently asked questions
Does it work the same for your own buildings as for a client portfolio?
The mechanics are the same, what changes is how the information is split up. With your own buildings, whoever opens a request is an employee and the cost is internal. With a client portfolio you need to separate by owner, control what each one sees, and be able to prove what was delivered, which is an extra layer on top of the same thing.
What's the difference between a CMMS and a CAFM?
A CMMS manages maintenance: assets, work orders, preventive maintenance, spare parts, and history. A CAFM manages space: square footage, occupancy, desks, and moves. They're different categories solving different problems.
Is GMAO Cloud a facility management software?
It covers the maintenance part, which is usually what concentrates the most operating spend for an FM team. It doesn't manage space or occupancy, and we'd rather say that upfront than have you find out later.
Does it work for managing cleaning or security services?
Yes, treated as recurring services that get scheduled, carried out, and proven. It's not specialized cleaning software, but planned work on a site with proof of execution works the same way.
What should I look at when comparing tools?
Three practical things: what the vendor says it does NOT do, whether you can define your own statuses and workflows or have to adapt to theirs, and who owns the history if you ever leave. Feature lists all look alike.
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