Getting a CMMS with the Kit Digital grant

Kit Digital is a Spanish public grant program to help small businesses and freelancers digitalize part of their operations. Among the solutions it covers is process management, which is where maintenance software fits in.

The grant is real and worth taking advantage of. But there’s an idea worth making clear before anything else, because it’s what separates rollouts that work from ones that end up as an unused license.

The voucher covers the software, not the rollout

A subsidized CMMS that nobody uses costs exactly the same as a paid one that nobody uses: wasted time.

The work of getting a maintenance system up and running — registering the assets, defining what gets checked on each equipment family and how often, loading current documentation, getting the team used to logging work in the field — isn’t covered by any grant. You put that in yourself.

That’s not an argument against Kit Digital. It’s an argument for planning it: if you use the voucher without setting aside time for the rollout, you’ll have spent the grant on a tool that stays empty.

What’s worth knowing beforehand

Amounts and categories change with each call for applications and by company size. Any specific figure you read on a website — including this one — may be out of date, so the reliable source is always the program’s official one.

The voucher covers part of the cost, not all of it and not indefinitely.

There are deadlines and conditions for keeping the solution in place that are worth checking before deciding, not after.

That’s why we don’t publish amounts or categories here: we’d rather you check the current conditions at the official source and talk to us about how it fits your specific case. You can get in touch and we’ll look at it.

Who benefits most from it

Small businesses and freelancers who today work with paper work orders and spreadsheets, and especially maintenance companies, installers, and technical assistance services.

The reason is that in those cases the leap is noticeable from month one: going from jotting down hours from memory in the evening to logging them with a timer right in the work order immediately changes what you know about your own business.

It’s least useful where a system is already up and running and the goal is to replace it: there, the dominant cost is migration, and the voucher doesn’t cover that either.

How to use the grant so it actually pays off

Three decisions worth more than the grant itself.

Start with critical assets, not the full inventory. The ones that stop production or the service if they fail, with their inspection plans and frequency. Six months loading data before seeing a result exhausts any team, and that’s where subsidized rollouts die: the grant gets used up, the system is half-configured, and nobody wants to open it again.

Bring the technician in from the start. The system is fed by whoever is in the field. If the app complicates their day, they’ll log late and poorly. It’s worth them seeing it before anything is decided, not after.

Set aside time, not just budget. A few hours a week during the first weeks, from someone who knows the operation and can make decisions.

What you should have running by the end

A more honest way to know whether the rollout worked than a list of enabled modules:

• Preventive maintenance generating work orders on its own, with an owner and a date.
• Technicians closing those orders in the field, with measured times and material consumed against the warehouse.
• The checklists for critical equipment written up, with their reference values.
• Documentation with an expiry date loaded, warning before it lapses.
• And the first report with real data: cost per asset, hours per client, plan completion.

If you have that by the end, the grant was worth something. If you have a license and a half-finished inventory, it wasn’t.

The most expensive mistake: choosing based on what the voucher covers

There’s an understandable temptation when a grant exists: to choose the solution that best fits the subsidized category instead of the one that best fits your work.

It’s expensive, because the grant runs out and the tool stays. The criteria that decide whether a maintenance system works are the same with a grant as without one:

Whether the technician will actually use it. That’s what determines whether there will be data or reconstructions from memory.

Whether it works without a connection. Maintenance happens in basements and machine rooms.

Whether it can be configured by equipment family instead of one unit at a time. The difference between the two is weeks of work the grant doesn’t pay for.

Whether it talks to what you already have, and with exactly what scope. Integrations lists the details of each connector, which aren’t the same for all of them.

How you get your data out if you ever decide to switch.

There’s a full guide on choosing the best CMMS. It’s worth applying before looking at what’s subsidized, not after.

A cost detail that goes beyond the grant

Worth looking at because it affects the years that follow, once the grant is gone.

If the software is charged per user, the cost grows with the team, and as soon as you need to give access to clients or subcontractors the bill spikes. What tends to happen then is that accounts get shared, and as soon as two people sign in with the same user, the history stops holding up as proof.

In GMAO CLOUD, licenses are unlimited across all three plans. It’s worth doing the math with the headcount you’ll have in three years, not today’s, because the grant covers the start and not the ongoing subscription.

And Kit Consulting, which isn’t the same thing

They’re often confused. Kit Consulting funds advisory services, not software licenses. It’s meant to have an expert help you define how to digitalize, not to buy the tool.

They can be complementary — advisory on one side and the solution on the other — but they’re not interchangeable, and that confusion is why many people end up in the wrong program. More detail on the Kit Digital and Kit Consulting pages.

Where to start

Check the current conditions at the program’s official source and, in parallel, do the work that doesn’t depend on any grant: write down the list of your critical assets and what gets done to each one and how often.

Once you have that, request a demo around those specific pieces of equipment. It’s the best way to know whether the solution fits before filing anything.