The number you actually have to defend. Four places a CMMS pays back — downtime, wrench time, inventory, and compliance — with every assumption visible and editable.
Vendor ROI calculators are notorious for picking flattering percentages and hiding them. Here are the four this uses, stated plainly so you can argue with them.
Moving work from reactive to planned reduces unplanned downtime, mostly by catching failures while they are still small. Published case studies routinely claim 20–40%; 15% is deliberately at the low end, because the results depend far more on whether your team actually adopts the system than on the software.
Technicians lose real hours to paperwork, hunting for asset history, and walking to the parts room to find out whether something is in stock. A CMMS with mobile access recovers part of that — not all of it, because some administration is irreducible. This assumes 40% of the hours you enter.
This is the line item voice capture moves most. Typing a work order on a phone is slow enough that technicians batch it to the end of shift and lose detail; speaking it costs almost nothing at the point of work.
Carrying cost — capital, storage, obsolescence, shrinkage — is conventionally 15–25% of inventory value annually. This uses 18%, and assumes a CMMS with real usage history lets you hold 10% less stock without increasing stockouts.
Most findings are documentation failures rather than maintenance failures — the work happened, the evidence didn't. A system that generates the record as a by-product of the work removes a large share of that category.
None of these land if the floor stops using the system. Every number above is contingent on adoption, which is why "will a technician still be using this in week six" is a better evaluation question than any feature comparison. Budget for that risk, not for the licence cost.
Pick your industry and ChatterFix builds the equipment hierarchy, PM schedules, quality checklists, and safety inspections to match — in about three minutes.