Start with the shop, not the feature list
When maintenance software disappoints, the product is rarely bad. It was built for a different world, and it carries that world’s assumptions into your shop. So before comparing features, decide which of the four kinds of software you are looking at:
- Spreadsheets and paper. Free, familiar, and the system most heavy equipment shops are actually running. Fine at ten machines. At forty, PM due dates, parts, and costs live in three files that stopped agreeing with each other months ago.
- General-purpose CMMS. Built for plants and facilities: assets bolted to a floor, calendar-based PMs, Wi-Fi in every corner. Strong work order engines. Hour meters, machines that move between sites, and offline field work are usually accommodated with custom fields and workarounds.
- Fleet and telematics platforms. Built around location, utilization, and dispatch, and often tied to the vendor’s own tracking hardware. Maintenance arrives as a module that records service history rather than running a shop: the parts room, warranty, shop overhead, and billing typically live somewhere else.
- Heavy equipment CMMS. Designed around the maintenance department that keeps iron running: PMs on hour meters at several intervals per machine, work orders that carry labor at a real shop rate, a parts room with purchasing, returns, and warranty, and a cost per hour that includes ownership.
Our longer read on the two kinds of software most shops end up with covers where each one starts to fight you. The rest of this page is the practical side: what to require, what to ask, and what to watch for.
CMMS, EAM, or fleet management software?
The labels overlap, and vendors use them loosely. Here is how to read them when they show up on a website:
- CMMS (computerized maintenance management system) is the work. PMs, work orders, parts, labor, and the history of what was done to each asset. Every option above except the spreadsheet calls itself one.
- EAM (enterprise asset management) is the asset over its whole life. It adds acquisition, depreciation, ownership cost, and disposal to the maintenance record. For a fleet, the useful test is whether ownership cost sits beside repair cost in the same cost per hour.
- Fleet management software is the operation. Location, utilization, dispatch, fuel, and operators. Maintenance may be included, but the centre of gravity is where the machines are and how hard they are working.
A heavy equipment shop usually needs the first two in one system and a clean connection to the third. Where that boundary sits is mapped in our heavy equipment fleet management software guide.
The requirements that separate a system from a filing cabinet
Feature lists are long and mostly identical. These nine requirements are the ones that actually vary between the four kinds of software, and the ones where a shortfall ends up in a spreadsheet beside the system. What each column shows is typical behaviour for that kind of software, not a promise about any product, so verify every cell in the demo:
| Requirement | Spreadsheets | General-purpose CMMS | Fleet / telematics platforms | Heavy equipment CMMS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PMs on hour meters, several intervals per machine | Manual, and the first thing to drift | Meter-based PMs exist; stacking 250/500/1,000/2,000-hour intervals on one asset often needs workarounds | Alerts from telematics; whether a work order sits behind them varies | Native, with calendar backstops for machines that sit |
| Meter readings from telematics and inspections | Typed in | Typically typed in or imported | From the vendor’s own hardware | From any telematics feed or a field inspection |
| Work orders carrying labor, parts, and outside services | Partial at best | Labor and parts, usually at wage rate | A service log with cost fields | All three, with labor at an overhead-loaded shop rate |
| Parts room: purchase orders, receiving, returns, cores, warranty | Separate files that disagree | Inventory and POs; returns and warranty vary widely | Rarely more than a parts list | Full workflow, each step with a data trail |
| Overhead capture and a shop rate | A spreadsheet nobody trusts | Rare | Rare | Built in and applied to labor |
| Billing work back to jobs or cost centres | Manual, at month end | Custom fields and exports | Rare | Built in, with review status |
| Cost per hour including ownership | Rebuilt by hand once a year | Total maintenance cost at best | Fuel and utilization, not repair cost | Live per asset: capital, repair, operating |
| Offline mobile for the field | No | Varies; often read-only offline | Varies | Create and close work orders offline |
| Telematics-agnostic across OEMs | Not applicable | Via integrations, where they exist | Often tied to the vendor’s trackers | Any feed, any brand of iron |
Nothing in the left column is exotic. Every heavy equipment maintenance department already does all nine things; the only question is whether they happen inside the software or beside it. The difference is the subject of our piece on systems versus filing cabinets, and it is what the twelve questions below are designed to expose.
Twelve questions to ask every vendor
The dashboard demo is designed to impress. Ask for the details instead. The answers tell you where your data will go wrong, and “show me” beats “do you support” every time:
- How do hour meter readings get in, and what happens when one is wrong? You want telematics and inspections as sources, and a correction that leaves a trail instead of silently rewriting history.
- Can one machine carry several PM intervals at once, with a calendar backstop? A 250-hour oil change, a 500-hour service, and a 2,000-hour overhaul on the same asset, plus a date-based fallback for the unit that sits all winter.
- Show me a part returned to the vendor. What happens to stock, cost, and the purchase order? If the answer is “delete it from the PO”, the parts record can be rewritten with no record of why.
- Show me a mechanic adding a part that is still under warranty on that machine. A warranty note is not a warranty workflow. The system should flag it before you pay for the same failure twice.
- How is mechanic labor costed on a work order: at wage, or at a shop rate that carries overhead? Wage-rate labor leaves the shop building, service trucks, and supervisor in a bucket that never lands on a machine.
- Show me a work order billed to a job or cost centre, and where its review status lives. Billing that happens in accounting by email is billing the CMMS never sees.
- Show me a machine’s cost per hour with ownership included. Where does each number come from? Every figure should trace back to a work order, a purchase order, or an ownership entry, not a field somebody types once a year.
- What exactly works offline in the mobile app? Reading a record offline is easy. Creating and closing a work order with parts, in a pit with no signal, is the real test.
- Which telematics providers do you pull from, and does it require your hardware? A mixed fleet has three OEM portals and some older iron with nothing. The software should not care whose trackers are on the machine.
- How does our data get in at onboarding, and how does it get out if we leave? Migration of assets, parts, and history is the difference between day one and month three. Export formats tell you who owns the data.
- How is it priced, and what does our actual fleet cost? Per user, per asset, or per device changes the bill by an order of magnitude at 150 machines. Get the number before the demo, not after.
- Who answers after go-live, and how fast? The shop will hit something the demo did not cover in the first month. Support response time is part of the product.
Red flags in the demo
Six answers that should end an evaluation, or at least move the vendor down the list:
- “You’d handle that in a spreadsheet.” That is the workaround, and the workaround is where the data goes wrong. If a must-have needs a file beside the system, the system does not have it.
- “You can add a custom field for that.” A field is not a workflow. Returns, warranty, and billing are transactions that need a trail, not a box someone remembers to fill in.
- Pricing only after a discovery call. Per-asset and per-device pricing climbs with every unit you add. Know the model before the pitch, or the real number arrives at the end of a sales cycle you have already invested in.
- Maintenance is “a module”. Ask whether the parts room, shop overhead, and billing live in that module, or in accounting and Excel. Recording service history is not running a shop.
- The software needs the vendor’s hardware. A mixed fleet already has several OEM portals and some older iron with no telematics at all. Software whose value depends on its trackers will fight that fleet forever.
- “Offline” means cached and read-only. Hand the phone to a mechanic, switch on airplane mode, and ask them to open a work order, add a part, and close it. If they cannot, the field does not have a CMMS.
A simple way to score it
Put the nine requirements above into a sheet with three columns: must-have or nice-to-have, a weight from 1 to 3, and a score from 0 to 2 for each vendor, where 0 is not there, 1 is a workaround, and 2 is native and demonstrated. Then run the same five tests with every vendor and score them live, not from the brochure:
- A part returned to a vendor, and what happens to stock, cost, and the PO.
- A mechanic adding a part that is still under warranty on that machine.
- A shop rate built from actual overhead and applied to labor on a work order.
- A work order billed to a job or cost centre, with its review status.
- A machine’s cost per hour with ownership costs included.
Multiply, total, and compare. Two rules keep the score honest. First, if the winner needs a spreadsheet beside it for any must-have, it did not win. Second, the people who decide whether the data is right are not the people who sign the contract, so put a mechanic, the parts person, whoever does the billing, and someone from finance in the demos. The manager buys the system; the shop decides whether it becomes the source of truth.
Where Tenmil fits
Tenmil is the fourth kind of software on this page: a heavy equipment CMMS built around the maintenance department. PMs run on hour meters at several intervals per machine, with meters fed from any telematics provider or a field inspection. Work orders carry labor at a shop rate built from real overhead, parts, and outside services. The parts room handles purchasing, receiving, returns, cores, and warranty as transactions with a trail. Work is billed to jobs, every machine carries a cost per hour with ownership included, and the mobile app creates and closes work orders fully offline. Pricing is public.
That does not make it the right answer for everyone. If you run a plant, a general-purpose CMMS will likely serve you better. If your main problem is knowing where the equipment is, a fleet platform may be the right first purchase. If you run a heavy equipment shop and want its workflows inside the software, run the twelve questions on us. Our heavy equipment maintenance software page and CMMS for construction guide show the answers in detail, and the equipment cost per hour calculator and shop rate calculator let you run your own numbers before anyone runs a demo.
Pricing you don't have to ask for
Most vendors hide their pricing behind a quote form. Tenmil's is public: per-user plans, free trial, no credit card required.
- Free trial on every plan
- Mobile app included
- Data migration help at onboarding
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about choosing a CMMS for heavy equipment.
A CMMS (computerized maintenance management system) is software that runs the maintenance work on a set of assets: preventive maintenance schedules, work orders, the labor and parts that go into each job, and the history of what was done to every asset. For heavy equipment the defining details are hour-meter based PMs, work orders a mechanic can close in the field, and a parts room with purchasing and warranty tied to the machine the part went on.
A CMMS manages the work: PMs, work orders, parts, and labor. EAM (enterprise asset management) manages the asset across its whole life, adding acquisition, depreciation, ownership cost, and disposal to the maintenance record. Vendors use both labels loosely, so the practical test for a fleet is whether ownership cost sits beside repair and operating cost in one cost per hour per machine. If it does, the system is doing the EAM job whatever it is called.
Fleet management software is built around the operation: where the machines are, how hard they are working, dispatch, fuel, and operators. A CMMS is built around the maintenance department: what is due, what is open, what parts and labor went into it, and what it cost. Many fleet platforms include a maintenance module that records service history; the difference shows in whether the parts room, shop overhead, warranty, and billing live inside it or somewhere else. Most heavy equipment shops need a CMMS with a clean connection to the fleet or telematics side, not one pretending to be the other.
Nine things decide whether the software can hold your numbers: PMs on hour meters with several intervals per machine; meter readings from telematics and inspections, not typed in; work orders that carry labor at a real shop rate plus parts and outside services; a parts room with purchase orders, receiving, returns, cores, and warranty; overhead capture that produces a shop rate; billing work back to jobs or cost centres; cost per hour that includes ownership; a mobile app that creates and closes work orders offline; and telematics integration that is not tied to one hardware vendor. Score each one in the demo, not from the brochure.
No. Hour-based PMs only need hour readings, and readings can come from a daily inspection or a walkaround in the mobile app. Telematics removes the typing and keeps meters current on machines nobody inspects every day, so it is worth having on the units that carry it. What matters when choosing software is that it accepts hours from both sources and from any telematics provider, because a mixed fleet will have several brands of iron and some older machines with no telematics at all.
Three models are common: per user, per asset, and per device when tracking hardware is involved. Per-asset and per-device pricing climbs with every machine you add and is usually only revealed after a sales call. Tenmil is priced per user, and the numbers are public: Professional is $75 per user per month, Advanced is $99 per user per month, and Enterprise is custom-quoted. Whatever the model, ask for the total for your actual fleet size and user count before the demo, so the number is not a surprise at the end of the sales cycle.
Run the twelve questions on Tenmil
A live, one-hour walkthrough that answers every question on this page on your own fleet scenario: the part return, the warranty flag, shop-rate labor, the billed work order, and cost per hour with ownership.