Maintenance Assistant CMMS slashes the time for maintenance professionals to find, enter and order their critical parts from hours to minutes with new functionality

Toronto, Ontario – November 6, 2013 – Maintenance Assistant, Inc., a global leader in cloud maintenance management CMMS systems, announced the release of their new parts search and procurement platform which allows users to seamlessly source and purchase parts and supplies intelligently from within their CMMS application.  “MA CMMS users now have instant access to over 1,000,000 parts and supplies from some of the top suppliers in the world. The selection, availability and speed of delivery is remarkable, and definitely shortens unplanned, costly production shutdowns”, said Marc Castel, CEO.  “Our new parts feature eliminates one of the biggest problems in Maintenance – having the right parts at the right time – and reduces the significant time and effort it takes to buy them”, said Corbin Church, VP of Business Development.  Indirect MRO parts – for Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul – are everyday replacement parts and supplies that are critical to the safe and efficient functioning of any business or production line. MRO parts are time consuming to buy, often taking up as much as 80% of the total purchasing time while they only reflect 20% of the total inventory value. To deal with the problem, larger companies have installed expensive and complex inventory management and EAM systems, or rely on vendor-managed in-house stores. “In contrast, our intelligent solution works behind the scenes, using a multi-factor search algorithm to eliminate complexity, making this powerful tool broadly available to small and mid-sized companies at no extra cost”, said Daryl Sedgman, President.

“Solving this problem was not easy”, explains Willie Wong, Project Lead. “iMRO parts are often referred to as the “iMRO Monster” due to the disproportionate effort that is spent locating and buying parts. Often parts have multiple part numbers for the same part, or have partial and vague information associated with the part, leading to confusion and mis-ordering, which even the expensive inventory systems have had trouble with.” Maintenance Assistant’s powerful and contextual search capabilities let maintenance professionals find appropriately matched parts and equipment from new and existing vendors, and allows them to enter those part numbers, part information and their associations to assets, directly into their CMMS with the click of a button.  “Coupled with our new purchasing engine, the system will be able to pull up previous pricing and provide maintenance managers and purchasing agents with more information to improve order accuracy, simplify the buying process and drive down costs”, said Bob Kandic, Senior System Architect. “MA CMMS can even be set-up to notify managers which parts are needed for future maintenance, send out RFQs when supplies get low, or automatically reorder items according to predefined rules and spending limits, reducing time consuming and error prone manual data entry.”

The new functionality also serves as a rapid on-boarding tool, allowing users to set-up and populate their asset and parts databases quickly and accurately or add missing information to existing assets within their maintenance management system with a simple search and select. “We were delighted when our beta testers reported a significant reduction in the time needed to get a new CMMS up and running and without the need for additional support from our team”, said Jeff O’Brien Director of Customer Success.

“We are always searching for ways to make maintenance management efficient and effective and we believe that these new features will make the maintenance manager’s job that much easier and drive more money to their company’s bottom line.” said Marc Castel. “Today’s announcement should be especially welcome news for small and medium businesses that struggle to contain costs, while large companies will find that these new features will streamline their maintenance operations.”

About Maintenance Assistant CMMS software:

Maintenance Assistant CMMS is an essential operational and management tool for managing scheduled and unscheduled maintenance of assets such as buildings, manufacturing plants and equipment. “Our mission is to be the global CMMS of choice by focusing on product excellence, an outstanding customer experience and an easy-to-understand low monthly price” said Marc Castel, CEO. Maintenance Assistant helps companies drive down the cost of maintenance, work smarter and save money by helping to increase asset life, prevent equipment failure, track maintenance costs, improve productivity, reduce equipment downtime, and lower the total cost of ownership of equipment, while at the same time improving legal, regulatory and audit compliance.

Since its launch in 2006, Maintenance Assistant CMMS has been deployed in over 150 countries and in more than 30 languages. We are one of the world’s leading multi-tenant cloud Maintenance Software solutions, providing a modern CMMS / EAM experience to our customers.