Your CMMS Handles the Ops. Does It Handle the Reporting?
Licensing decisions are coming anyway. Might be time to ask a harder question about what you're paying for — and whether there's a better way.
Yesterday I laid out what Microsoft 365 licensing actually costs with Copilot added in. Today's question follows directly from that.
If you're going to be making licensing decisions anyway, it's worth asking at the same time whether your current CMMS is delivering on the reporting side.
Most CMMS platforms are genuinely good at what they were designed for. Work orders, asset registers, preventive maintenance scheduling — the core operational engine is usually solid.
The Reporting Side Is a Different Story
Rigid templates that don't reflect how your operation is actually structured. Dashboards that looked great in the sales demo and require a support ticket to change in production. Cross-site comparisons that need someone to manually pull and combine exports. Integrations with your finance or HR systems that have been "on the roadmap" for two years.
A Question Worth Asking
Here's the question worth asking before your next renewal: what am I actually paying for in the reporting layer, and what would it take to build something better on infrastructure I'm already paying for?
For multi-site operations in FM, utilities, and infrastructure, SharePoint as a data backbone, Power BI for dashboards you actually control, Power Automate for workflow triggers — this combination is increasingly viable as a reporting layer that sits alongside your CMMS rather than replacing it.
The transactional core stays where it is. The reporting and KPI layer moves somewhere more flexible.
The build cost is a one-off investment. The ongoing cost, on licences you're already carrying, is zero.