CMMS for airports and infrastructure

A transport infrastructure — an airport, a station, a port — concentrates almost every maintenance difficulty at once: a huge and highly heterogeneous asset base, continuous operation with narrow intervention windows, dozens of contractors working in parallel, and a traceability requirement that leaves no room for gaps.

What follows is how that gets organized, whatever the size of the facility.

An asset base unlike any other

Within the same facility, completely unrelated things coexist: HVAC and air treatment, electrical systems and backup generators, elevators and escalators, automatic doors, baggage systems, lighting and beaconing, fire protection, domestic water, refrigeration, and paving and buildings.

The only way to make that manageable is classification. In asset management equipment is grouped by system, family, and model, with its location — including geographic position — its model, serial number, installation date, warranty expiration, its priority, and whatever custom fields each type needs, each with its own unit.

That classification isn’t bureaucracy: it’s what lets you define the inspection schedule for a type of equipment once and apply it to the two hundred units of that type, instead of configuring them one by one.

And the QR code on every asset solves the real problem in a large facility: identifying exactly which unit you’re standing in front of.

Declared criticality

When a facility can’t stop, you need to decide in advance what gets attended to first, because there’s no time to debate it in the moment.

Every asset carries its own priority, and incidents carry theirs, with their type and subtype, zone, who’s handling them, and a maximum time per status. There’s also an SLA entity with its name, priority, and limit, and the incident’s timings are logged.

That way, what’s overdue shows up on a list instead of being discovered when someone complains, and afterward you can measure response time and resolution time separately.

The work windows

The trait that sets infrastructure apart the most: almost nothing can be done whenever the technician wants. There are night windows, low seasons, and moments when a zone can be closed and others when it can’t.

That’s why two things matter. That the calendar lets you see the workload and move work by dragging it when operations demand something else: if rescheduling costs more than ignoring the plan, the plan gets ignored. And that preventive maintenance checks holidays and technician availability before generating the order.

A single asset can have several schedules at once, which is how this works: the weekly check, the quarterly inspection, and the annual one with an approved control body are three separate plans on the same equipment.

And when wear depends on use — cycles of a door, hours on a baggage belt, starts of a generator — the asset can carry a counter with a limit and a warning percentage: once a logged reading crosses the threshold, the preventive order is generated automatically.

Many contractors, one single history

In an infrastructure, almost all the work is carried out by external companies, often one per specialty. If each one keeps its reports in its own system, the owner doesn’t have a history: it has invoices.

Providers are registered and receive the work orders assigned to them, logging time, materials, documentation, and signature the same way in-house staff would. Since licenses are unlimited on all three plans, registering every contractor isn’t a budget decision.

And there’s a connector between GMAO Cloud installations, in both directions, for when the contractor also uses it: work moves from one system to the other with no intermediate file, keeping its traceability.

That also enables the check that justifies the contract: the annual plan executed report answers how many interventions were scheduled and how many actually happened.

Checking with actual values

In infrastructure, the record is only as good as the numbers: pressures, temperatures, consumption, generator switchover times, lighting levels, clearances.

Checklists support fields with minimum and maximum values, so a reading outside range is logged as an anomaly on the spot. And on preventive orders, the app won’t let you close them until the fields are complete.

That anomaly then has to turn into an incident with a priority and an owner, or into an explicit decision to do nothing. Silence is what teaches the technician that logging doesn’t matter.

Without coverage, which is the norm

Technical galleries, machine rooms, pits, field areas. The app stores orders, assets, and documents on the device itself and queues actions taken offline; if one fails to sync, it’s flagged with its reason instead of being lost.

The documentation, which is the case file

Certificates from the control body, inspection reports, manufacturer protocols, contracts, approvals, insurance policies.

The document manager attaches them to the asset, the building, the contractor, or the order, decides who can see them, and sets an expiration date, with a daily check for anything about to expire and its corresponding alert. Certificates carry their number, scope, issuer, and holder.

Worth knowing: legal maintenance is not a module — it’s achieved through the preventive maintenance mechanism, and the proof comes from the history, the checklists, and this documentation. The software records and proves; the one accountable to the regulation is the owner.

What to look at afterward

Reports on executed plan, anomalies by system, downtime, MTBF and MTTR, cost per piece of equipment, and hours per contractor.

In an infrastructure, the most useful one is usually the cross-reference between anomalies and model: when a fault repeats on the same model throughout the facility, it stops being a breakdown and becomes an argument with the manufacturer or with the tender specification.

Where to start

With one complete system — HVAC, doors, electrical — with its assets, schedules, and frequencies, and with its contractor registered. Within weeks there’s preventive maintenance being generated and reports being closed with real data, and you can see what to adjust before rolling it out to the rest.

If you’d like to see it applied to your own facility, you can request a demo or write to us.