Your first 100 days with a CMMS: A blueprint for getting value with new maintenance software

The average company uses 112 different systems and software in 2025. But only 48% of them meet or exceed their business targets, according to Gartner’s 2025 CIO Survey. 

That means most businesses spend millions on systems that don’t live up to expectations and linger in the tech stack, draining trust, resources, and money.

The seed of most software failure is planted on day-one of using the system. Disorganization leads to confusion, so no one uses the tech. Instead of gathering wins, it gathers dust.

That’s why, if you’re planning to adopt a CMMS (computerized maintenance management system), you need a solid plan that drives value quickly in the first 100 days. If adoption is high and impact is visible within this time, the odds of long-term success skyrocket.

This article is an in-depth walkthrough of your first 100 days with a new CMMS, including:

• Top tips to prepare for a CMMS implementation
• Common risks, challenges, and pitfalls to avoid
• A 100-day plan for rolling out your CMMS
• How to keep the momentum rolling after the first 100 days

Key Takeaways

• The first 100 days are make-or-break for CMMS success. Adoption and early wins dramatically increase long-term ROI.
  
• Most failures happen early due to poor planning, messy data, and lack of team buy-in.
  
• Progress over perfection is critical. Start small, build momentum, and scale deliberately.
  
• Track progress using key metrics like adoption rate, data coverage, and maintenance KPIs.
  
• The CMMS journey doesn’t stop after 100 days. Continued optimization, team feedback, and integrations are essential.

But first, some key information about this guide

The right CMMS implementation plan will look different for every team, depending on factors like size, goals, assets, and experience. That’s why this 100-day plan should be a starting point. Adjust and modify it for your needs. The primary goal is to use your CMMS early and often to ensure adoption and show progress toward targets as quickly as possible.

This guide was also built assuming you:

• Purchased or will purchase a modern, cloud-based CMMS
• Have a CMMS implementation lead and champions for the project
• Operate at one or more industrial facilities with moderate to high asset complexity
• Received basic onboarding and training from a vendor, or have training materials available

Before the 100 days: How to ensure CMMS implementation is successful

Most CMMS implementations fail before the first work order is logged. The foundation you lay before day one determines time to value or if you even see value. Here’s how to make those early moves count:

• Get buy-in early, from as many people as possible: Create as many champions for the software as you can, from senior leaders who hold the purse strings to technicians who will use the system every day. Include them in the process leading to launch, from selecting the vendor to building the project plan.

• Train early and communicate often: Don’t wait until go-live to introduce the system. Run training sessions by role so your team is comfortable with the CMMS before it becomes a part of their daily lives. The more familiar they are before launch, the faster they’ll adopt it.

• Centralize and clean your data: Clean and organized data is essential for implementing a CMMS as the alternative can zap momentum and kill adoption. Collect information on assets, procedures, parts, vendors, and preventive maintenance tasks (PMs).

• Outline clear goals, risks, and KPIs: Define goals for the CMMS, not just for the first 100 days, but for at least the first year. Set KPIs to track adoption and progress from day one. Identify risks that could derail progress so you can plan for them or avoid them.

• Assign roles and responsibilities: A successful rollout needs clear ownership. Decide who is responsible for all areas of the implementation, from configuring the system to training the team. Outline who is responsible and accountable, and who is informed and consulted.

• Partner closely with your vendor: Lean on your CMMS provider for help. They’ve seen hundreds of implementations and can guide you through yours. The best ones will be by your side, helping you import data, set up workflows, and customize features.

• Digitize your processes: Start converting your paper SOPs, checklists, and PMs into digital formats. A CMMS can’t automate what it can’t see. If you’re short on time, prioritize high-value equipment and critical procedures first.

Here are some more helpful articles on leading a CMMS implementation:

• Before You Get Started: Three Crucial Pre-Implementation Steps for a CMMS
• A Complete Guide to Implementing a CMMS Successfully
• The Ultimate Guide to a Seamless CMMS Implementation

What to avoid doing during your 100 days with a CMMS

Your first 100 days with a CMMS are about building momentum, trust, and the foundation for long-term success. Here is where most projects veer away from these goals:

• Doing too much, too soon: Don’t try to load every workflow, train technicians, and set up all your reports in the first few days. You’ll likely overload yourself and your team while accomplishing less.

• Not putting your team first: Adoption doesn’t happen automatically. If you don’t train, listen to feedback, or make the system usable for the people doing the work, they’ll find ways to work around it.

• Focusing on perfection instead of progress: It’s easy to look at the full system setup and get tech paralysis. While it’s important to have the end in mind, focus on starting small. Add one asset. Schedule one PM. Every step forward is a win.

• Treating a CMMS as just software: Implementing maintenance software isn’t just a tech project, it’s an operational transformation. It changes how maintenance is managed, completed, and reported on. If you disregard the impact your CMMS has on your people and processes, you risk diminishing its impact.

How to define success in your first 100 days with a CMMS

Creating goals, milestones, and KPIs for implementation helps you track and communicate progress. It also allows you to break your project into smaller, manageable segments while catching risks early.

The definition of success will differ depending on the factors that make your team unique, like size and industry. For inspiration, here are few common goals of a CMMS implementation:

1. Adoption: Achieving your other goals will be impossible if no one is using your CMMS. Make an adoption goal for your maintenance team and maintenance requesters. Measure the percentage of work orders completed and maintenance requests received with the CMMS.

2. Data onboarding rate: Set a benchmark for the percentage of assets, procedures, PMs, parts, and SOPs you add to your CMMS. Segment by shift, maintenance type, asset or other area to prioritize the work.

3. Training completed: Team training is a leading indicator for adoption, which makes training completion rate a key measure of success. Track the number of hours completed against the total number of hours required.

4. User feedback implemented: Part of the ongoing process of improving and optimizing your CMMS is implementing regular feedback from users. This is especially true in the early days of the rollout. Measure the number of improvements completed from your backlog of ideas and requests.

5. Data capture and completeness: A CMMS gives you the opportunity to collect more and better data. Creating a goal for what data to capture and the accuracy of this data during the initial setup will increase your chance of success down the road.

6. Select maintenance metrics: These are the metrics you want to improve with a CMMS, like downtime, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and mean time to repair (MTTR). Pick one or two metrics in your first 100 days, targeting MTTR for bad actors.

An example of a CMMS implementation success dashboard

This is an example of a success tracking dashboard for a CMMS rollout showing the goals for the first 60 days and progress after 30 days.

A day-by-day plan for your first 100 days with a CMMS

Think of the following plan as a series of sprints or milestones. Adjust the framework based on your operation’s complexity, team size, and goals.

Day 1–5: Setup and foundation

• Set up system access: Set up user roles (admins, users, requesters) and permissions

• Configure locations and assets: Add locations and start adding assets, using this handy guide on asset naming conventions. Begin with production critical assets and assets with the most recurring work associated with them. Start creating an asset hierarchy.

• Create test procedures, PMs, and parts: Create procedures, PMs, and parts to test the system. They don’t have to be active or assigned. They’re to help you to understand how to add and configure the right fields, and connect them together.
  

Day 5–10: Build and launch primary procedures and workflows

Create primary procedures:

• Determine which procedures and PMs to start with. Some ways to split this out is by shift, technician, priority, or asset.
• Create procedures, including checklists, pass/fail conditions, mandatory fields, attached SOPs or images, PPE, and conditional logic
• Associate procedures with relevant assets.
  

Configure select parts

• Set up parts in your CMMS associated with your primary procedures. Ensure you add clear naming conventions, locations (down to the bin number), images, associated cost, and minimum stock levels.
• Associate parts with your primary procedures and assets.

Build and assign your first work orders:

• Create work orders, starting with simple PMs. 
• Associate procedures and parts to work orders. 
• Assign people or teams, estimated times, priority levels, maintenance types. 
• Configure other fields in the work order.
• Ensure notifications are turned on for admins and technicians.
  

Day 10–20: Expanded PM, work order, and maintenance request setup 

• Configure recurring PMs: Create, schedule, and assign preventive maintenance tasks.  Start with frequent tasks on critical equipment and work through your list from there. As you progress through your PM schedule, add more assets, procedures, and parts to your CMMS.
  
  
• Launch non-planned work orders: Start creating, scheduling, and assigning reactive work to technicians in your CMMS. This may require you to add assets, procedures, and parts that are not in your CMMS yet. Do your best to create them on the fly and associate them with reactive work, then come back later to fine-tune them.

• Begin rollout of external maintenance requests: Enable maintenance requests to be received from others at your organization, whether that’s operators, production leads, or office workers. Configure requests, routing, and sign-offs.

Day 21–30: Fine-tune workflows/data and set up reporting

• Create QR codes for assets: Generate QR codes for assets that link to work orders, procedures, SOPs, and other documentation. Stick these QR codes to accessible areas of an asset to make it easier for technicians to find information quickly.

• Add more details to your parts: Add the exact location of parts if you haven’t already. Add vendors, reordering information, purchase orders, costs, warranties, and other details.

• Tag work orders for deeper insights: Expand categories for your work orders to better segment data. Tag by maintenance type, priority, team, failure, and other custom categories.

• Build baseline reporting: Create essential dashboards and regular reports to track key metrics, like open vs. completed work orders, PM completion rate, downtime, and costs.
  

Day 31–40: Assess progress and adjust plan

• Evaluate adoption and usage: Assess technician usage, work completion, and requests received in the CMMS. Identify where work is being done outside the system and why so you can plug these gaps with extra training or by modifying workflows.

• Refine processes: Get feedback on CMMS workflows and processes, then adjust them based on feedback. This includes removing friction points, like having too many work order fields or failure codes, or having too many irrelevant notifications sent to techs.

• Identify unused/underused capabilities: Look for CMMS features you haven’t explored or used to their full potential. Will these features help your team in the next 60 days or distract them from primary goals? Create a plan to implement helpful features in the coming weeks.
  
  
• Communicate wins: Share early wins from your CMMS rollout. For example, if adoption is high, make sure senior leaders know that. If response times are faster or people are leaving on time more often, highlight it to your team.

Day 41–60: Complete transition of all workflows to CMMS

• Move remaining workflows into the CMMS: Finish adding all assets, procedures, PMs, and parts to the system. Close any systems or methods that were used prior, like spreadsheets or old software.
  
  
• Connect related workflows: Link all procedures, PMs, and parts to related assets or WOs.

Day 61-80: Workflow gap analysis and optimization

• Expand tagging and categorization: Add or refine custom tags across work orders, PMs, procedures, and assets to improve reporting and root cause analysis.
  
  
• Introduce multi-asset workflows: Build workflows for inspections or cleanings that apply across multiple machines or locations.

• Find areas for increased automation: Set up conditional logic to automatically trigger actions like approvals, escalations, follow-up work, or purchase orders.
  
  
• Optimize work orders for better data capture: Review and improve work order templates to track time, cost, part usage, and technician notes. Ensure digital sign-offs, mandatory fields, and clear instructions are in place.
  
  
• Digitize remaining SOPs: Identify remaining paper-based procedures or checklists and convert them into your CMMS format. Attach SOPs to relevant procedures or assets.

• Expand and refine reporting: Audit your current dashboards to find missing or underused reports. Add advanced reports, like cost per asset or time spent by work type.
  
  
• Continue to monitor adoption: Identify users or teams with low login or completion rates. Offer refresher training or one-on-one support to close the gap.

Day 81-94: Set up and test simple integrations

• Identify MVP integrations: This might include integrations to IT systems, like an ERP, business intelligence, or purchasing system. It also includes OT systems, like meters or IoT sensors.
  
  
• Start with easy, low-risk integrations: Some integrations are complex and take time to get right. Start with out-of-the-box integrations instead. Work with your IT team and CMMS vendor to plan for and execute the integrations.

Day 95–99: Plan for your next 100 days

• Set goals for your next phase: Define what success looks like for the next quarter, including further expansion of your CMMS and the impact on your operation, like downtime.
  
  
• Chart the future of maintenance reporting: Lay out a plan to expand maintenance reporting and analytics with in-depth reports and a process for communicating insights.
  
  
• Plan to scale: Prepare to roll out your CMMS to additional teams or sites. Identify which workflows to carry over and who needs to be involved in the scaling.
  
  
• Outline optimization points: Identify what to improve and automate next. For example, which integrations do you want to pursue? Do you want to transition from time-based maintenance to condition-based maintenance?
  

Day 100: Celebrate your wins

• Make this milestone a moment: Recognize the team. Share the success with the rest of the company. Reward top adopters. Celebrate with the people who made this possible.

After the 100 days: How to get the most out of your CMMS

While the first 100 days with your CMMS were about laying a solid foundation, the next phase is about getting the most out of your maintenance software. Here are four ways to do that:

1. Adopt a plan, do, check, act cycle

Use this lean-inspired framework to guide improvements:

• Plan: Include quarterly KPI targets, how you want to accomplish them, and how to use your CMMS to achieve them.
  
  
• Do: Implement your plan, including new workflows, reports, and training.
  
  
• Check: Set up CMMS dashboards to measure progress and results. Establish regular milestones and check-ins to ensure your plan is working and flag areas for improvement.
  
  
• Act: Adjust your plan based on what you learn. Repeat the cycle.
  

2. Translate maintenance wins into business value

A key benefit of using a CMMS is capturing more data about your maintenance program and turning it into insights without a lot of manual work. Use the reporting capabilities of your CMMS to:

• Find key trends and take action with operations leaders: Maintenance and production should share a dashboard with key metrics that help them boost uptime and output.

• Share key wins with business leaders: Track progress toward big goals, factors that led to these improvements, and strategies for sustaining success. Analyze data to find potential risks or negative trends, and ways to mitigate them. Then use this guide on translating maintenance metrics to KPIs that resonate at the highest levels of your business.
  
  
• Use data to enable frontline workers: Use dashboards and visual reports to keep your maintenance team up to date on progress, areas to improve, and big wins. Developing a data-aware culture will unite the team around common goals and promote collaboration.
  

3. Use collaboration to evolve your CMMS

The best ideas for improving your CMMS usually come from the people using the system most—your technicians. Here is how to create a feedback loop to ensure your tech investment is providing consistent value:

• Make feedback a part of regular meetings, whether it’s daily shift meetings or a dedicated monthly session. Ask what workflows or processes are the hardest to do, take the most time, or cause the most frustration.
  
  
• Create a dashboard to show what improvements have been implemented and review it with your team on a regular basis. Not only will this ensure continuous improvement of the system, but it will show your team that they are an important part of the process.
  

4. Work towards being completely connected

The deeper your CMMS is embedded in the day-to-day of your business, the bigger the impact your team will have. Here are some ways to connect your CMMS across systems and departments:

• Integrate with business systems: Work with IT and your vendor to connect your CMMS to the company’s ERP, finance, procurement, inventory, and HR systems.

• Connect work and asset data: Capture asset data with meters and sensors and collect work history through work order fields. Connecting this information will help you get even more precise with maintenance planning and forecasting.

• Adopt AI into your processes: AI is a topic that deserves several dedicated articles (or even a report), like one about maintenance teams using AI or about the critical first step to adopting AI. The big takeaway, though, is that maintenance teams should have a plan for integrating AI into their CMMS, whether it’s creating new procedures, analyzing data, or adopting predictive maintenance.

• Get more departments involved: From operators using the system for basic inspections to senior leaders looking at weekly reports, getting more people using the system will boost its impact and value across the organization.

Successful CMMS implementation relies people, processes, and software

Your first 100 days with a CMMS set the tone, but they’re just the beginning. True value comes from turning your CMMS into a core part of how your team operates, collaborates, and improves. Treat it not as a software rollout, but as an ongoing transformation. Build on your wins, get feedback from your team, and keep iterating.

Frequently asked questions

What’s a good adoption rate for a CMMS?

A strong target is 70–80% of all maintenance work tracked in the system and full access and training for every technician. Measure both login activity and actual work completed in the CMMS.

What should I track to measure the success of my CMMS rollout?

Focus on a combination of usage metrics (like work orders completed), data coverage (assets/parts added), training completion, and early business impact (like reduced downtime or faster repairs).

How long does it take to fully implement a CMMS?

Most companies can launch core functionality in 30–60 days, with full workflows, reporting, and integrations rolled out over 6–12 months. The 100-day mark is a key milestone, not the finish line.

How can I get technicians to use the system consistently?

Prioritize training, build workflows that are fast and intuitive, celebrate wins, and continuously collect and implement feedback. Highlight how the CMMS helps them save time and do their jobs better.

Is MaintainX suitable for multi-site operations?

Yes. MaintainX is built for scaling across teams, facilities, and geographies. You can standardize processes, centralize data, and manage each site’s unique needs—all in one platform.