When your CMMS becomes the bottleneck

We keep having the same conversation with building owners running Connected FM programs. Everything stalls at the CMMS.

So I asked the community to confirm it. What's the #1 thing your CMMS should do better?

The top answer is the most basic question you can ask about any piece of software: will anyone open it? And the next two—asset data and prioritization—are prerequisites for everything the industry is trying to do with condition-based maintenance, outcome-based service contracts, and portfolio-level analytics.

This tracks with what we're hearing directly from owners.

Adoption is the first obstacle. Epic Investment Services—a Canadian property management firm with 26.6 million square feet—replaced their CMMS entirely because their teams had stopped using it. Nada Sutic, Epic's Head of Sustainability, Innovation and National Programs, pushed back when leadership suggested more training: "I don't want to invest the time to get people good at using a product that isn't very good." After switching to a mobile-first platform (Visitt), median response time on tenant requests dropped from 36 minutes to 10 minutes, and tracked requests jumped 291%.

But Sutic was blunt about the other side: preventive maintenance adoption still lags. Getting operators to document and execute PM work consistently is harder, because it requires changing entrenched behavior, cleaning up stale equipment records, and doing the unglamorous data hygiene work that competes with daily fire drills.

This pattern is everywhere. According to a MaintainX analysis of industry data, 58% of facilities spend less than half their maintenance time on scheduled or preventive work—even though 87% of facilities say they use preventive maintenance.

The asset register is stale. At our CMMS roundtable, building owners all flagged the next obstacle: The CMMS was built to track work orders. What they need now is software that tracks the physical equipment those work orders are tied to, so you can connect a maintenance task to a specific asset that someone went out and serviced—and learn how efficient your technicians and your equipment really are.

For most organizations, that link doesn't exist yet. The asset register is whatever someone typed in during setup. Serial numbers are missing, installation dates are wrong, and the data hasn't been updated since week two.

And the asset register problem doesn't stop at the FM department. There's no mapping between their maintenance program and their OT device management program. The CMMS tracks HVAC equipment and mechanical systems. The OT side—if it exists as a managed program at all—tracks BAS controllers, IoT sensors, gateways, and switches.

When a controller fails, when a sensor battery dies, when a device drops off the network for a cybersecurity patch, none of that lands in the maintenance program. The FM team responsible for keeping the building running has no visibility into digital assets the program depends on.

The system can't tell you what matters most. Only 18% of maintenance teams use condition-based maintenance, according to the same MaintainX data. The CMMS can tell you what's in the queue. It can't tell you what to do first based on what the building is experiencing right now. That requires integration with FDD, BAS, and sensor data—and the integration either hasn't been done yet or creates unnecessary breakdowns.

If you outsource maintenance, your CMMS gap is bigger than you think. Most FM teams hire service contractors for at least part of their maintenance work. That means your data is split across at least two CMMS platforms—yours and theirs—and the integration between them is almost always nonexistent.

Critical asset data, performance history, and warranty information sits in someone else's system, and you can't get it back if you fire them.

It also caps how far your service contracts can evolve. When the service provider's tools and the owner's tools can't share data, everyone defaults to time-and-materials, because that's what the software supports. Your contracts are stuck in the past because your CMMS is.

The market is already moving. The community is responding to these limitations in three ways:

→ Replace: Epic replaced their CMMS with a mobile-first platform (Visitt) chosen on simplicity. The response time data—36 minutes down to 10—proved the bet.

→ Build around: Software vendors are adding work order workflows directly into their platforms, so insights from analytics and diagnostics can trigger maintenance actions without requiring a separate CMMS integration. Data Layer providers are positioning themselves as the digital asset register that maintenance depends on—structured, current, and mapped to real equipment. And AI is accelerating asset data enrichment by populating asset records from model and serial numbers, O&M manuals, and drawings—work that used to take months of manual audits.

→ Integrate (painfully): Others are bearing the cost of connecting their CMMS to FDD and analytics platforms. University of Iowa and Clockworks Analytics are presenting at NexusCast 2 on April 15 about how to integrate CBM with the CMMS without flooding the system with work orders.

All of this is happening as AI is raising the ceiling on what owners expect from their software. Two-thirds of maintenance teams say they'll adopt AI by the end of 2026, and the top reported benefit is knowledge capture and sharing. But every AI capability you'd want—auto-enriching asset registers, surfacing tribal knowledge at the point of work, prioritizing tasks by condition—depends on the same prerequisites your CMMS is missing today. AI simply raises the stakes on those limitations.

The question for every FM team is whether your CMMS is a foundation you can build on—or an obstacle you're already building around.

Grade Your Program

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If you replaced your CMMS tomorrow, what's the one thing the new tool would have to do that your current one can't? And if you've already built a workaround, what does it look like? Email us at hello@nexuslabs.online