The question comes up on almost every industrial project: do you need dedicated maintenance software, or is the module built into the ERP enough? The answer depends less on feature richness than on one rarely examined thing — how much information has to flow between maintenance and production.
What a specialised CMMS does better
Dedicated tools stand out on a few specific fronts, and it is worth naming them honestly rather than pretending otherwise:
- Condition-based maintenance: continuous measurement (vibration, temperature, consumption), thresholds, degradation curves. This assumes a sensor data collection that few ERPs carry.
- Very deep equipment hierarchies: a refinery or a water network goes down six or seven levels, with tens of thousands of functional points.
- Heavy regulatory management: pressure vessels, lifting gear, classified installations, with an external inspection calendar and standardised reports.
If none of these three points describes your situation, a separate CMMS probably does not bring what you think it does.
The real cost of separation
Two pieces of software mean an interface, and an interface is never free. It has to carry, both ways: the equipment register, the spare parts and their stock, the labour hours, the allocated costs, and above all the machine stoppages that must feed back into scheduling. That last point is the one systematically forgotten at the moment of choosing.
Concretely: a preventive job planned for Tuesday morning on the machining centre must make that workstation unavailable in the production schedule. If the two systems do not share the same machine capacity, the planner keeps loading a stopped station, and no one notices until the Tuesday in question. Rebuilding that synchronisation through an interface costs, in practice, more than the functional gap you were trying to fill.
Spare parts often settle the debate
The spare-parts store is where the two worlds clash hardest. A part issued for a job must decrement a stock, trigger a replenishment, be charged to an equipment cost and appear in the accounting valuation. When that stock lives in the CMMS and the rest in the ERP, you end up either with two diverging stocks or with a nightly sync that makes real-time stock an illusion. A single store, with a simple attribute flagging maintenance items, avoids the problem by design.
A simple decision rule
Ask yourself three questions. Does maintenance represent more than ten full-time people? Do you run instrumented predictive maintenance? Is your equipment subject to periodic external regulatory inspection? Two “yes” answers justify looking at a dedicated CMMS. One, or none, and the built-in module will serve you better — not because it does more, but because nothing needs to be copied between two databases.
In AVIA ERP, jobs, equipment and spare parts share the production register: a planned stoppage removes the affected station's capacity, and the job cost flows straight into the machine's cost price.