CMMS - Friend or Foe?

There are few pieces of software more universally purchased and more universally resented than a Computerized Maintenance Management System, and Joel Levitt knows exactly why. In this full-color graphic novella, he traces the distrust back to its roots, a breakdown in maintenance culture that began in the 1970s when managers started using work order data to scrutinize workers rather than fight deterioration, prompting entire workforces to quietly falsify their hours and hollow out the very system meant to help them. Decades of bad data followed, and the CMMS got the blame for problems that were never really about software at all. Levitt dismantles that inherited resentment with characteristic clarity, explaining through an apple tree metaphor that a CMMS is only as useful as the data fed into it, and that when workers trust the system and managers use it honestly, it becomes a powerful tool for maintenance management training and maintenance leadership training. It serves as a financial and operational record that exposes the bad actors dragging a plant down, justifies capital investment with hard numbers, and gives maintenance teams the evidence they need to make decisions that actually stick.