Why is the failure rate of CMMS projects so high?

China special but maybe applicable elsewhere…

Case #1

Unbeknown to the naive management team, Prospects #1 had already selected a friendly supplier willing and simply found random competitors in a WeChat group. Thanks to our status in the industry, we are contacted by various middlemen but end up taking to the client directly. All competitors are IT suppliers with limited experience of maintenance systems and one of our copycats. Prospects #1 chose competitor without previous experience. Project totally fail to deliver the expected results. Failure is blamed on the maintenance team “unwilling to change their habits”. Duh.

Case #2

The company’s headquarters suggests the local team to work with a specialist such as Siveco China rather than the Plant Maintenance module or their global ERP. The local team insists to deploy the ERP module, promising it will be fast and cheap, something unheard of anywhere in the world. Two years later, the coverage of the system remains limited to administrative aspects and cost controls on a PC, with limited usage by maintenance teams. Additional software must be purchased and implemented for the mobile solution, inspections, HSE, etc. Total cost and effort is much higher than the alternative, with very poor quality results.

Case #3

A large chemical plant needs to improve maintenance. After an assessment is performed by Siveco China, an ISO 55000 based program is defined. Corporate IT steps in and propose to deploy the global ERP system, according to the plan it will be ready for China in about 10 years (ten). After protests from the local team, the promised duration is changed to 2 years, the technical manager is promoted to global ERP leader. 15 years later, the plant still has no maintenance system, the maintenance problems remain more or less the same as 15 years ago.

Case #4

A plant works with Siveco China since construction, a good showcase of best O&M practices. After acquisition by a new owner, management changes, the technical team stops using the system expecting the new owner to bring their own system. Three years later, maintenance has reverted to a manual process with reporting to Excel and from Excel to Power BI… It looks computerized but isn’t. A previous showcase has fallen below industry average and the new owner, perhaps not even realizing a system was previously used, is trying to implement a traditional IT-focused EAM system.

Why these stories? A Maintenance improvement project, a CMMS/EAM project aimed at improvement, must be managed by involving top management, O&M management and IT. This is what Siveco China is good at. We have 20 years experience in China doing just that, with multinationals (all examples above are typical MNCs…) as well as local SOEs (so no excuse like “my team is very local they don’t accept the concept of preventive maintenance” – 80% of our business is with SOEs…).

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This article was written by myself, Bruno Lhopiteau, hence the non-corporate tone and typos, without the help of any AI with the exception of the main illustration and this short bio, both generated with Grok 2 beta version:

Bruno Lhopiteau is a French entrepreneur and the Managing Director of Siveco China and Bluebee Technologies, a group of companies he founded in 2004 that specializes in maintenance and industrial risk management solutions. He has been instrumental in leveraging China's development in infrastructure to expand his business, focusing on environmental and operational technologies. Lhopiteau has also extended his expertise to the Belt and Road Initiative projects, providing strategic maintenance services for Chinese infrastructure projects abroad and later directly to end-clients. His work integrates both Western and Chinese business practices, making him a notable figure in cross-border industrial cooperation.