Global CMMS projects in China: 5 causes of failure and their solutions!

In line with its role, dedicated to help clients to deal with the specificities of maintenance in China, Siveco China shares some experience and thoughts on the subject.

What is the motivation for a CMMS rollout to China? Maintenance system implementations in the West are often justified by a reduction in direct cost: reducing overtime is often cited as a key objective. This bears very little relevance to China where labor cost is low… On the other hand, huge opportunities exist to reduce indirect costs or losses, which tend to be disproportionately high in our market. In fact, we usually obtain much better ROI in China, with payback in around one year, sometimes much faster (weeks).

The Western idea that maintenance should be well organized before introducing a CMMS always results in delays, as China is far from being a mature market when it comes to maintenance. As a result, long decision cycles – several years – are the norm with multinationals, compounded by high staff turnover (both local staff and expatriates). Local teams get frustrated by what they perceive as inefficient decision processes, while the benefits the CMMS project would have brought in terms of organization get postponed.

When the decision is finally made, contract terms are often based on Western practice: contracts on a time and material basis, customers trying to do more work in-house. In China, this approach is almost certain to kill the project: local users are inexperienced, IT less familiar with non-technical subjects, while the global team (if any) most likely has no experience whatsoever in this country. A project that should have taken 2-3 months (time is of the essence in China) ends up taking years… Due to high turnover, everybody will have left by the end of the project…

Contrary to what we see in Europe, where the CMMS installation comes only after having implemented preventive maintenance, with a trained team and optimal organization, the use of a CMMS in China will help to immediately structure the maintenance function, to put in place the analysis of historical data, to start training teams on the concept and practice of preventive maintenance. Above all, the introduction of high-tech tools will motivate the maintenance team and show its value.

The implementation itself brings its own list of issues. First of all, the IT platform: should the server be located at global headquarters, considering the limitations in the Chinese telecom infrastructures (insufficient international capacity resulting in low speed and sometimes long outages, arbitrary restrictions on the Chinese internet with for example the blocking of ports used for Java applications, etc.)?

Contracts should be on a fixed-price basis with a clear scope, defined in terms of industrial objectives in China, not IT. Extensive service is likely to be required, which includes maintenance consulting and coaching services that multinationals usually perform by themselves in the West.

On the other end, experience has shown we can often do much better here, owing to the lack of pre-existing structure: centralized web-based systems, unified coding systems based on international standards, extensive use of graphical diagrams and measurable ROI over a short period. The more we deal with multinational customers, the more we realize that what we have learnt in China, in terms of implementation approach, system design, coaching and follow-up services… also works abroad. Some of our customers have started to recognize this too… Food for thoughts…

Tags： West vs. China、CMMS