When it comes to managing your assets, you want to be sure you’re choosing the right kind of software. If you belong to an asset-intensive industry, then EAM software and CMMS are two names you’re likely to hear often. If you don’t know which one is best for your business, conducting a comprehensive EAM vs. CMMS study will help you make the right choice.

Get our CMMS Software Requirements Template

What This Article Covers:

• What Is CMMS?
• What Is EAM?
• Key Differences
• Uses
  • CMMS
  • EAM
• Which Is Best for My Business?
• Conclusion

What Is CMMS?

CMMS is a software type used to streamline and automate maintenance tasks, providing communications for maintenance-related activities. The major focus of CMMS is maintenance. CMMS is all about communication and coordination.

Its core goals are to automate maintenance scheduling, streamline inventory, manage work orders and maintain databases on asset information. For instance, a core feature of CMMS systems is work order management.

Work order management tools provide a digital format to replace paper-based work orders and function as a major support tenet of your maintenance database. While an EAM system may have work order management features, they’re a must-have for CMMS.

A CMMS may also include approval workflows and integrate with other systems to automate repetitive tasks. A CMMS assists your organization in ensuring that its assets always remain in proper working condition while avoiding unexpected downtime or issues.

What Is EAM?

EAM is a software category used to preserve assets for their full life cycle and maximize their potential for enterprise use. EAM is generally considered to be a superset of CMMS that offers a greater specificity of asset targeting features. It can do what a CMMS does and then some.

Here’s an example: historically, EAM systems would offer an asset life cycle management module. All assets have a set life span, and to effectively manage them, it’s key to be aware of where that asset is in its life cycle. This helps determine if that asset is providing value to your business.

Asset life cycle management functionality helps users plan for updates, replacements and other changes that might cause serious setbacks if they happen by surprise. It used to be strictly an EAM feature, but as CMMS became more advanced and diverse, it’s now often offered by both types of systems.

Get our EAM Software Requirements Template

Key Differences

The key distinction between EAM and CMMS is that EAM encompasses a variety of business functions. CMMS, on the other hand, is more focused on maintenance.

CMMS systems manage a single location or provide limited multi-site support, but EAM systems offer a comprehensive set of features for managing multiple sites and businesses.

An EAM system can track the entire asset life cycle, starting with design and installation, whereas a CMMS only tracks an asset after you purchase and install it.

Another way to explain the general difference between CMMS and EAM is with a simple logic statement: while all (or most) EAM solutions have some CMMS capability, not all CMMS tools have EAM functionality.

Another way to say this is that EAM is broader and more comprehensive than CMMS, more sophisticated in general, and more robust in terms of its application. The differences are sort of like those differences between BI and BA, in that one is included inside the scope of the other.

Or, think about the difference between EAM and CMMS in terms of size and company structure. Companies may sometimes upgrade to EAM when they’ve outgrown a simpler CMMS program.

Some experts suggest establishing a rule of thumb when considering purchasing or upgrading: one is that a company with over 100 maintenance personnel should consider EAM tools. Another could be an organization that operates more than one or two facilities should consider an EAM.

A company with more diverse maintenance staff — for example, a company with mechanical maintenance teams and IT maintenance departments — might make more use of EAM solutions. A smaller company with only a dozen or so maintenance workers could be fairly happy with the limited functionality of a CMMS suite.

EAM continues to focus on this life cycle of a wide range of organizational physical assets when compared to CMMS. While CMMS applications have additional features to compete with EAMs, their functionality won’t be on par with EAMs if they’re supposed to manage an organization’s entire asset portfolio.

EAM and CMMS also differ in who’s using them. For CMMS, technicians, maintenance workers and operations teams typically use them directly to manage their operations. These same groups also use EAM software, but C-level users, accounting and compliance teams addressing overarching asset issues, budgeting staff, and more use them as well.

Compare Top CMMS and EAM Software Leaders

Uses

Now that we know the major differences between the two, let’s dive into some potential use cases for both:

CMMS

One of the most common ways companies use CMMS is as a communications process for work orders and other maintenance tasks. Before CMMS existed, employees would use punch cards to communicate pending work, completed projects and future maintenance tasks. The dawn of computers digitized, improved and expanded that unwieldy system, however.

Considering CMMS as a work order system is helpful because it’s partially how many companies have benefited from implementing these tools. As new software products have helped the business world modernize, systems originally designed for one thing — say, keeping track of maintenance performed on assets — evolve to become the go-to for a range of new tasks that were once the purview of something else entirely.

CMMS is a good example of this. The lines between CMMS and EAM software have begun to blur as it has developed. To stay competitive, CMMS vendors are adding more EAM-type features to CMMS systems on the market, so the confusion is understandable.

The idea behind CMMS is you need a centralized space to keep track of all existing work orders and maintenance requirements. When you don’t have one of these centralized spaces, things go missing, and items get overlooked. One employee accidentally deletes emails, another misplaces memos, that job everyone thought Jenny would do was actually Kevin’s and suddenly everyone’s confused.

The primary use of CMMS in many companies is as a digital system for ensuring that the correct person does maintenance tasks. It also ensures that employees log maintenance requests and that each machine or asset gets its own designated maintenance monitoring.

A CMMS suite may be great for specific things like predictive and preventive maintenance as a concentrated system.

It may have just the right features for documenting everything that goes into regular and consistent maintenance, but not many peripherals involve asset credentialing or vendor relationships. So CMMS can be great for a team that’s only focused on keeping machines running but not as good for a team tasked with making long-term use decisions.

EAM

Using EAM, again, is much broader and geared toward a greater spectrum of monitoring and planning outcomes. It includes the maintenance perspective, but it isn’t called EAM maintenance software because that’s a secondary aspect of its abilities.

EAM includes elements of design perspectives centered on the idea that by creating digital models, companies can optimize how they use each asset they invest money in according to its build and the greater context around its use. This helps companies better predict asset depreciation and never be surprised by unexpected asset failures.

EAM tools also include insurance and warranty information. They look at things like the environmental performance of an asset or piece of machinery to assist with audit trails and environmental impact reports.

They also integrate with inventory management solutions and supply chain management software to reduce menial data entry tasks and perform inventory management tasks. The key use of EAM solutions is ensuring change never affects an asset’s total cost of ownership (TCO).

Some EAM systems expand to include more future functionality. Some can use application programming interfaces, or APIs to connect to a broader IT architecture. EAM allows for executive-level viewing and feedback to help decision-makers chart the best course for their business. You can see this in reporting and analytics features that deliver business intelligence data directly from your EAM.

In a sense, EAM tools provide basic maintenance scheduling abilities, plus more of a context for planning and evaluation. In the same way customer relationship management software facilitates connections with a customer base, EAM tools give leaders a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening with every one of their assets.

Compare Top CMMS Software Leaders

Which Is Best for My Business?

EAM and CMMS are both asset management solutions or maintenance systems.

EAM systems are ideal for large enterprises with several locations and extensive assets. They combine robust maintenance and asset management capabilities with advanced features such as life cycle cost tracking and analysis, enterprise-grade support for multiple locations and businesses, and functionality for non-MRO departments such as accounting and engineering.

EAM systems connect your company, from BI practices at the top through supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and building automation systems (BAS) processes at the bottom, providing a larger range of integration choices than computerized maintenance management systems.

However, for small businesses, the decision isn’t always so straightforward. Most computerized maintenance management systems can handle maintenance and MRO inventory requirements for smaller operations. They’re usually less expensive than EAM systems. A CMMS may be the optimal choice if you just want to implement a preventive maintenance program.

When it comes down to it, only you can decide which system is right for your business. Start by checking out our CMMS features and EAM requirements checklist guides to understand the feature-specific differences between the two.

You can also download our interactive CMMS requirements template and EAM requirements template to find out which would be best for you.

Receive Advice From the Experts

Next Steps

The differences between computerized maintenance management software and enterprise asset management software vary from system to system, and they’re also blurring as both become more advanced.

The increase in data collection, usage and analysis will make these types of software even more comprehensive and powerful. A future of interconnected machines and the IoT means significant changes for CMMS and EAM, all of which are exciting.

Those responsible for building software architectures for businesses can look at EAM and CMMS systems side by side to get an idea of what types of features and functionality each toolset has, with the understanding that EAM will generally aggregate more diverse tools than CMMS.

Are you ready to the start comparing products in one category or the other? Check out our CMMS comparison report or EAM comparison report to find some of the top solutions on the market.

How do you think CMMS/EAM software is changing? How has implementing one of these systems changed how your organization operates? Let us know your thoughts about CMMS vs. EAM in the comments!