Resources
Resources
Material that is useful whether or not you ever buy anything from us, and specific enough to argue with, which is the only kind of resource worth anybody's time.
Most vendor resource sections are lead magnets wearing a cardigan: a thin guide behind a form, written to be agreeable rather than useful. These are not gated, and they are written to be specific enough that you could disagree with them.
The rule that governs every page on this site governs these especially: nothing here states an interval, a limit, a threshold or a regulatory interpretation. Those belong to your qualified staff and the standards that apply to you.
Glossary
This field has a vocabulary problem. The same word means different things to a biomedical engineer, a finance director and a software vendor, and a good deal of confusion in procurement is really two people using one term for two ideas. These are the definitions we use, written so you can disagree with them precisely.
Buyer's guide
Every product in this category demonstrates well. The demo is built from clean data by someone who knows exactly where not to click, and it tells you almost nothing about the Tuesday in month eight when a ward is short a pump. These are the questions that do tell you, including the ones we answer badly.
Implementation guide
Most implementations in this category fail in a specific and avoidable way: the organisation decides to get the data right first, discovers that takes six months, and by the time anything is switched on the sponsor has moved role and the momentum is gone. This guide argues for the opposite sequence, and explains why.
Checklists and templates
You came here hoping for a checklist to download. We are not going to give you one, and the reason is the most useful thing on this page: a checklist written for equipment we have never seen, in a hospital we do not know, against standards we have not read, would be a liability wearing the costume of a shortcut.
Preventive maintenance guide
This is the practitioner page: how to actually run a programme, whatever software you use or do not. If you want the argument for having one, the Solutions page makes it. If you want to know how the scheduling machinery works, the Features page explains it. This one is about the job, and most of the job turns out to be politics rather than engineering.
CMMS vs EAM
The textbook answer is that a CMMS manages maintenance and an EAM manages the asset over its whole life. That is broadly true and almost useless in a procurement, because the labels are applied so loosely that neither tells you what a product actually does. Here is the real distinction, and the questions that survive it.
Preventive vs corrective maintenance
Preventive maintenance is done on a schedule to stop a failure. Corrective maintenance responds to one that already happened. That part is easy. The hard part is that every department is told to shift the ratio between them, almost nobody is told what the right ratio is, and the honest answer is that nobody knows yours.
Hospital CMMS vs generic CMMS
Most maintenance software was built for plant and facilities, where the worst case of a wrong decision is expensive. Medical equipment is different in one specific way that changes the software rather than the feature list: sometimes the correct behaviour is to refuse. This page is about that difference, and about when a generic product is genuinely the better buy.