Guide
What is a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System)?
A system that keeps the record of maintenance work: what happened, who did it, when, and with which spare parts. Its purpose is to turn what happens in the workshop from memory and scattered paper into data you can measure and decide on.
What it actually does
Intake and routing
A fault arrives and receives a reference number, then is assigned to a department and a named technician instead of staying a phone call on someone’s handset.
Work orders and tracking
Every job holds a status from a closed list — open, in progress, pending, resolved, closed — which is what makes sorting and measurement possible at all.
Asset and equipment history
Each asset carries its own history: its faults, what was spent on it, who held it. That is what later answers the repair-or-replace question.
Inventory and spare parts
Issuing a part is tied to the incident it was issued for. Without that link, stock is a number that shrinks with no record of where it went.
Preventive maintenance
Scheduled work driven by time or running hours, happening before the failure rather than after it.
Reporting
Indicators computed from recorded events: incident counts, response and repair times, distribution across departments.
When does an organisation need one?
The trigger is not the size of the facility — it is these symptoms:
- Incidents arrive by phone and messages, and nobody knows how many are open right now.
- The monthly report is filled in from memory at month end, not from a daily record.
- Spare parts run down with no record of which asset consumed them.
- The same fault recurs and there is nothing to prove that it recurred.
- An employee leaves and half of what the department knew leaves with them.
- Someone asks about team performance and there is no number to cite.
How to compare systems
The criteria that actually separate them — not the feature lists, which all look alike:
Where the data is stored
A security question before it is a technical one. Ask which options exist and the real status of each, not what is theoretically possible.
Arabic — in the interface and the reports
A translated interface is not enough if the exported report comes out with broken glyphs or Gregorian dates only. Ask for a sample export.
Whether it works without coverage
Workshops, warehouses and quaysides have weak coverage. A system that needs a constant connection gets filled in later — that is, approximately.
How many steps logging costs
If a technician must leave the incident screen to issue a part, logging gets deferred. Deferred data produces reports that look correct and are false.
Permissions and who sees what
Ask how a technician is prevented from seeing another department’s data — and whether that block lives in the database or only in the interface.
What happens on exit
Ask before signing: how is your data handed back if you move, and in what format?
Terms you will meet
- Work Order
- A record of a specific maintenance job: what is done, by whom, on which asset.
- Preventive Maintenance (PM)
- Scheduled work that happens before failure — by calendar or by running hours.
- Corrective maintenance
- Work after a failure, to return the asset to service.
- MTTR
- Mean time to repair — from the start of work until service returns.
- MTBF
- Mean time between failures on the same asset. A falling MTBF is a warning.
- Custody
- Equipment held by a named technician, with documented handover and return condition.
- Work permit
- Prior authorisation for hazardous work, with defined conditions, duration and approvals.
- Downtime
- The period an asset was out of service.
And where does Idrak fit?
An Arabic-first incidents, maintenance and operations system installed on mobile that makes logging happen where the work happens (saving requires a connection). Its operational build has been deployed since May 2026. From the list above it covers: intake and routing, work orders and tracking, inventory and spare parts, equipment custody, work permits, and reporting. Preventive-maintenance scheduling and the MTTR/MTBF indicators are not in it today — they appear above because this is a general guide, not because the product has them.