Everything you need to know about Computerised Maintenance Management Systems — what they do, who uses them, and how to choose the right one for your Australian organisation.
CMMS stands for Computerised Maintenance Management System. It is software designed to help organisations manage, track, and schedule maintenance activities for their physical assets and facilities.
At its core, a CMMS is a database that stores information about your assets (buildings, equipment, plant, vehicles) and the maintenance activities performed on them. It provides tools to create and assign work orders, schedule preventative maintenance, track time and costs, and generate reports on maintenance performance.
Before CMMS software became widespread, facilities teams managed maintenance through paper-based systems, spreadsheets, and collective memory. A tradesperson would write a job on a sticky note, a supervisor would track it in a spreadsheet, and the "asset history" was whatever someone could remember — or find in a filing cabinet. CMMS software replaces these manual processes with a structured, searchable, auditable system.
CMMS stands for Computerised Maintenance Management System. You may also see it written as "Computerized Maintenance Management System" (US spelling) or abbreviated CMMS. In Australia, "Computerised" with an 's' is the standard spelling. The term is sometimes used interchangeably with EAM (Enterprise Asset Management), though EAM typically refers to broader, enterprise-level systems with additional financial and procurement integration.
A CMMS is built around several core functions that together create a complete maintenance management system:
CMMS software emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in large industrial environments — initially in manufacturing and utilities, where the cost of unplanned downtime was significant enough to justify early computing investments. Early systems were mainframe-based and highly complex to operate.
Through the 1990s and 2000s, CMMS became accessible to mid-sized organisations as client-server software. The 2010s saw a shift to cloud-hosted SaaS CMMS platforms. Today, modern CMMS options range from cloud SaaS to self-hosted deployments that run on an organisation's own infrastructure — as inFM does.
A well-designed CMMS covers these six areas — together they form a complete maintenance management capability.
The backbone of any CMMS. Work orders record what maintenance needs to be done, who is doing it, the priority, the asset it relates to, and the outcome. A CMMS with strong work order management allows reactive work (someone reports a fault) and planned work (PM schedules) to flow through the same system, giving a unified view of all maintenance activity.
The asset register is a database of every physical asset the organisation maintains. Each asset record stores: location, specifications, installation date, warranty status, maintenance history, and associated documents. A good asset register lets you find any asset in seconds, see its full maintenance history, and understand its current condition and compliance status.
Preventative Maintenance scheduling automates the creation of recurring maintenance work orders. Configure a schedule (monthly HVAC filter check, annual fire system test, quarterly lift service), and the CMMS generates the work order automatically at the right time. Without PM scheduling in a CMMS, preventative maintenance depends on someone remembering to create the job — which means it gets missed when things get busy.
Some CMMS platforms include parts and inventory management — tracking spare parts, consumables, and materials used in maintenance. Parts can be linked to work orders so that parts usage is recorded against the correct asset and job. Inventory tracking helps avoid maintenance delays caused by missing parts, and provides data for parts procurement planning.
Reporting turns maintenance data into management insights. CMMS reports can show: maintenance costs by asset or building, PM completion rates, overdue work orders, asset downtime history, technician productivity, and compliance status. Good reporting is essential for demonstrating maintenance program performance to management and regulators.
Modern CMMS platforms are accessible via mobile devices — allowing technicians to view work orders, record completions, and update asset records from the field. inFM is a browser-based application, meaning it works on any device (phone, tablet, laptop) without requiring a native app installation. Tradespeople can access their work queue from any device on the site network.
Many facilities teams start managing maintenance with spreadsheets — and for very small operations, a spreadsheet can work. But as organisations grow, the limitations of spreadsheet-based maintenance management become painful:
A maintenance spreadsheet can only be updated by one person at a time, and version conflicts create data corruption. A CMMS handles concurrent access by multiple users simultaneously — a team of 20 tradespeople can all access and update work orders at the same time without conflict.
Spreadsheets have no built-in audit trail. When a row is modified, there's no record of who changed it, what it said before, or when the change was made. A CMMS records every change to every record with a timestamp and user attribution — essential for compliance audits.
A spreadsheet can't automatically generate next month's PM work orders, send notifications when jobs are overdue, or escalate urgent jobs to supervisors. A CMMS does all of this automatically, reducing administrative overhead and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
Finding historical maintenance records in a spreadsheet means manual searching through rows and columns. A CMMS provides instant search across all records and generates formatted reports in seconds — whether you need an asset's five-year maintenance history or a list of all overdue PM tasks across the portfolio.
CMMS software is used across virtually every industry that manages physical assets or facilities:
CMMS software is available in two primary deployment models:
Cloud CMMS (SaaS): Hosted by the vendor in a cloud data centre. Accessed via browser or app. Typically per-user subscription pricing. No server to maintain. Data is held by the vendor. Requires reliable internet connectivity. Not suitable for air-gapped or restricted network environments.
Self-Hosted CMMS: Deployed on your own server infrastructure (on-premises, private data centre, or private cloud). All data stays within your network. Works without internet access. Typically flat or one-time licensing. Requires server hardware and IT maintenance. Suitable for air-gapped networks, data sovereignty requirements, and remote sites.
inFM supports both models — cloud deployment on Fly.io for organisations who want managed infrastructure, and full self-hosted deployment for organisations with on-premises requirements. See our self-hosted CMMS guide for more detail.
When evaluating CMMS options for your Australian organisation, consider:
inFM is an Australian-built CMMS that works online or offline, self-hosted or in the cloud. Talk to us about your requirements.