So, you’ve decided to implement a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). You know it will help you increase productivity, reduce maintenance costs, and improve your overall asset health. There’s just one catch: your boss wants to know how quickly you’ll see a return on investment (ROI).
When it comes to a CMMS, ROI is often elusive and hard to pin down. It depends on a number of factors and varies by industry, facility, and team. But the more clearly you can communicate CMMS ROI, the more likely your boss is to give you the go-ahead.
In this article, we’re going to break down each aspect of CMMS ROI, how to calculate it, and how to communicate it as accurately as possible.
Key takeaways
- The total cost of ownership of a CMMS includes the cost of subscription, implementation, integration, training and support, and hardware purchases, like mobile devices.
- Calculating the amount you save and benefit from a CMMS should include productivity gains, downtime reduction, and maintenance cost savings.
- A CMMS reduces unplanned downtime by an average of 32%, which also lowers maintenance costs.
- Most facilities see positive CMMS ROI within six to 12 months of implementation.
- Building a compelling business case for maintenance software requires quantifying both direct and indirect benefits.
How to calculate CMMS ROI
In its most basic terms, ROI for a CMMS is calculated as Benefits - Costs.
For example, if you save $50,000 in a year by using maintenance software and it costs $10,000 a year to run the CMMS, your ROI is $40,000 or 400%.
Looks simple enough, right? The truth is, many maintenance managers struggle to calculate and communicate CMMS ROI because each component of the formula is composed of many other numbers, which are rarely fixed or guaranteed. There are also many indirect benefits of using a CMMS which are difficult or impossible to quantify.
Still, calculating CMMS ROI is possible, and it’s absolutely worthwhile. So let’s get into it.
Calculating the total cost of CMMS ownership
To calculate ROI, you need to understand the total cost of ownership (TCO) for your CMMS. This isn’t as simple as crunching a number. Many cost categories make up the total cost, and each one is influenced by different factors. Let’s look at each of them.
Subscription costs
If you’re looking to adopt a cloud-based, mobile-first CMMS, you’ll likely be paying for the software on a subscription basis (usually charged as an annual fee, but sometimes monthly).
Your subscription cost will vary according to a number of factors, including:
- The size of your company. Most subscription-based CMMS plans offer different tiers for small to medium businesses and enterprise-level operations, with the assumption that enterprise clients need access to more—and more complex—features.
- The size of your team. Many CMMS subscription prices vary by the number of “seats” (also known as individual user accounts) you require.
- Which features you need. Most cloud-based CMMS platforms are tailored to different maintenance needs and levels of digital maturity. Your costs will vary based on whether you’re setting up a preventive maintenance program for a single site or a multi-facility predictive strategy that relies on integrations with IoT sensors and AI insights.
If you’re purchasing an on-premise CMMS, your up-front costs will be different. Rather than an ongoing subscription cost, you’ll pay a number of one-time fees, including a license fee, a hardware cost, and an installation cost to get things started.
Implementation costs
Implementation is a critical step in ensuring success with a CMMS. Most CMMS providers have their own implementation team to help you clean and import data, configure the system to your team, environment, and workflows, and set up essential procedures for your team.
As with subscription costs, the price of implementation will vary based on the size and goals of your organization. A single-site operation with a handful of users will have a more straightforward implementation than one that spans many facilities, roles, and permission levels.
Integration costs
A CMMS is most effective when it’s integrated with other software your company already uses. By leveraging data about machine health, parts inventory, and accounting systems, you can make informed decisions about what maintenance to do and when to do it, while triggering action on those decisions.
Most companies integrate their CMMS with their ERP software, production systems (such as an MES, IoT sensors, SCADA, and PLCs), and business software (such as purchasing systems). Each CMMS provider has their own process and costs for integration, so make sure you get a realistic estimate of how much these integrations will cost in total.
Mobile devices and other hardware costs
A cloud-based CMMS relies on each user having access to an app through their mobile devices. Maintenance teams may choose to let workers use their own mobile devices or purchase tablets. Since every mobile CMMS is built differently, it’s important to check in with your provider about which mobile experience is best for users.
While on-premise CMMS solutions don’t require mobile devices, they do come along with other hardware costs like servers, monitors, and sensors.
Training and ongoing support costs
Training and support costs will vary based on the size and needs of your organization and team. Maintenance teams on more robust CMMS plans need a dedicated account manager that can guide admins through complex setups, custom reporting, getting the most from AI capabilities, and more.
No matter which CMMS you choose, you should look for a provider that makes their support team available when you need help. A team that understands your goals and can grow with your company—and maintenance strategy—is important.
Calculating CMMS savings and benefits
Just as there’s no static, single number that encapsulates the cost of CMMS investment, the benefits and savings a CMMS creates are diverse, variable, and sometimes hard to quantify.
Let’s look at the main categories of ROI benefits and cost savings:
Maintenance cost savings
A CMMS allows you to accurately measure and reduce your maintenance costs.
Before you start measuring cost savings, it’s worthwhile to get a baseline reading. Use your CMMS to report on existing maintenance costs so you can start showing how they’ll improve over time. Maintenance costs include:
- Unplanned downtime costs: Adopting a CMMS allows facilities to move from a reactive to a preventive maintenance strategy, leading to less unplanned downtime (and the costs associated with it).
- Spare parts inventory costs: Parts inventory management and downtime costs go hand-in-hand. In our 2025 State of Industrial Maintenance Report, 58.9% of survey respondents reduced downtime costs by overhauling their inventory management using a CMMS. When you can prevent shortages with inventory tracking and create no-stockout lists, costs associated with spare parts go way down. ColdTrack saw this firsthand when they reduced their parts costs by 70% using a CMMS.
- Labor costs: The more labor hours your maintenance team incurs, the higher your labor costs will be. Overhauling your maintenance strategy to move away from reactive and calendar-based maintenance and towards preventive and condition-based maintenance will reduce labor costs by allowing your workforce to redirect their efforts.
- Fewer contractor hours. When you can better plan your workforce’s labor hours and daily workflows, you can also avoid an over-investment in contractors, which adds up over time.
- Safety costs: Reactive work increases incident risks and the costs associated with them. Implementing a CMMS not only allows you to reduce reactive maintenance, it also gives you a platform where you can store procedures and set permissions to reduce safety incidents. The net effect is that any costs associated with safety incidents and risks go down.
- Compliance costs: Without a CMMS, the risk of compliance fees is ever-present. Auditors need proof that your team is documenting inspections, checklists, and workflows. A CMMS builds that proof into the day-to-day of your maintenance team’s operations, driving down compliance costs.
Downtime reduction
Unplanned downtime is one of the greatest threats to manufacturing facilities. Breakdowns and failures can tank productivity and throughput while skyrocketing labor hours, overtime costs, and time spent troubleshooting.
Tracking downtime is an excellent way to show the ongoing value of a CMMS, and those who do report an average unplanned downtime reduction of 32%, according to our 2024 State of Industrial Maintenance Report. It’s also a great way to start improving overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). When Tosca implemented MaintainX, they found that by isolating where their downtime was coming from, they could increase OEE to over 80%.
As your maintenance strategy matures and downtime decreases, so will the costs associated with that downtime. In our 2025 State of Industrial Maintenance Report, 74% of respondents reported a stabilization or decrease in unplanned downtime over the past year, a figure that’s hard to impact—or grasp—without a CMMS.
Downtime is happening less—but costing more.
Even as 74% of organizations report fewer unplanned outages, 31% say those incidents are more expensive than they were last year. Troubleshooting speed and accuracy have never mattered more.
Productivity gains
Implementing a CMMS influences productivity in a number of ways, both direct and indirect. You can expect productivity gains in these areas with a CMMS:
- Better work order management and labor efficiency: A CMMS makes every aspect of work order management easier. When work orders can be created, assigned, completed, and closed within an easy-to-use mobile interface, the work that surrounds work orders (admin tasks, travel, searching for information) is removed, which drives up productivity. Additionally, being able to see open and overdue work orders on a dashboard makes it much easier to address problems early. You can calculate productivity gains by tracking work order completion rate and labor hours over time. Cardinal Glass LG Plant increased their on-time work order completion by 14% year over year with a CMMS.
- Reduction in time to repair: Unexpected breakdowns and a lack of information both drive up repair time. A CMMS decreases mean time to repair (MTTR) by allowing your team to prevent breakdowns altogether and access relevant asset history, checklists, and procedures when breakdowns do occur. Michaels cut their MTTR by 70% by introducing a CMMS.
- More efficient maintenance strategy: With the right CMMS, maintenance teams can mature their maintenance strategy with PM audits, well-timed inspections, and work orders that reflect a proactive rather than reactive approach to work. These improvements all positively impact productivity. You can quantify improvements in your maintenance strategy by tracking planned maintenance percentage and unplanned downtime.
Qualitative CMMS benefits
Not all CMMS benefits can be measured in hard numbers. Some improvements are experienced and felt, even if they’re not necessarily tracked month to month.
- Better-quality training for technicians. The more you can provide documented, process-oriented training that’s supported by how-tos and asset information, the smoother and more enjoyable the training process for new hires will be. This also leads to better knowledge retention and overall engagement over time.
- More reliable reporting. A CMMS makes it much easier to accurately capture real-time data. There’s a quantitative benefit here, but it also creates the overall sense that you can trust your numbers and use them to tell a reliable, consistent story.
- A happier workforce. Workers are engaged when they have the right tools to do their job. A CMMS not only allows workers to do more, but it also allows them to do their jobs more easily—and with less frustration due to inefficient processes and information gaps.
How long does it take to reach ROI with a CMMS?
Just like calculating the costs and benefits of a CMMS is complex, there is no fixed answer for how long it takes to reach ROI with a CMMS. The more you understand your own maintenance team’s KPIs, goals, and challenges, the more accurately you’ll be able to predict CMMS ROI.
There are also factors that accelerate and slow down CMMS ROI. User adoption, data quality, and process standardization are all critical puzzle pieces that could make or break your estimated ROI timeline.
Many manufacturing facilities see a positive ROI within 6-12 months after adopting a CMMS. You can predict your own ROI by using MaintainX’s CMMS ROI calculator.
How to communicate the ROI of CMMS software
Understanding ROI is one thing. Explaining it to higher-ups is another.
As we’ve discussed in this article, there are infinite hard-to-quantify factors that influence ROI. Your boss wants to hear about the ones you can quantify, and they want to see numbers that tell a story. If you can show how a CMMS will increase predicted capacity, drive down cost per unit, and reduce overall maintenance costs, you’re doing it right.
When it comes to ROI, realistic expectations are everything. If you’re presenting a case to executives, be sure to include an implementation timeline, milestones that aren’t overly optimistic, and cost savings you’re confident you can actually achieve. It’s usually worth it to run a small pilot program first to prove CMMS benefits on a smaller scale.
Be sure to communicate the indirect costs of change management as well. Introducing a new system takes time, effort, and widespread adoption to really take off. But these are costs you only have to incur once. A CMMS is a commitment, and if you can get executives on board in the early days, you’ll have a lot to show for it.
CMMS ROI FAQs
What is a realistic CMMS ROI timeline for manufacturing operations?
Many manufacturing facilities see a 150-300% return on investment (ROI) within 18 months of adopting a CMMS. This timeline will vary based on the size, complexity, and needs of the business adopting a CMMS.
How do I quantify productivity gains from CMMS implementation?
Productivity gains can be measured in labor hours, labor costs, mean time to repair, and work order completion rates.
What costs should I include in my CMMS ROI calculation?
A number of costs should be factored into CMMS ROI, including implementation costs, subscription fees, hardware costs (such as mobile devices), integrations costs, training costs, and ongoing customer support and account management.
How do I present CMMS ROI to executive leadership effectively?
Present ROI in terms your executives will understand. Think about how your CMMS will affect the bottom line of the business. If you can show how a CMMS will lead to capacity gains, a lower cost per unit, less unplanned downtime, and fewer labor hours, you’re focusing on the right things.
It’s also important to set appropriate expectations. Try to set conservative estimates and break down benefits by immediate improvements, 6-month cost savings, and longer-term returns.
What factors can negatively impact my projected CMMS ROI?
User adoption is the strongest indicator of ROI. If you fail to focus on change management, user training, and updating processes to include CMMS use, you’ll put ROI at risk.
How does CMMS ROI compare across different manufacturing industries?
The more complex the manufacturing industry, the harder it is to calculate CMMS ROI. Choosing a CMMS that has the right features for your industry is critical. When you know which KPIs you need to track and control, you can choose the right CMMS to get you there within the timeframe your organization needs.
The MaintainX team is made up of maintenance and manufacturing experts. They’re here to share industry knowledge, explain product features, and help workers get more done with MaintainX!
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