Your CMMS is only as good as the asset data you feed it, and for most FM providers the weak point is not Maximo or SFG20 but the manual step in between. Surveyors capture assets on site, someone rebuilds that data in a spreadsheet, and then someone types it into the CMMS one maintenance line at a time.
Fix that step with a capture layer that structures asset data at the source and packages it for upload, and the money you spent on your CMMS starts working the way it was meant to.
Maximo and SFG20 do exactly what they were built to do
A CMMS like Maximo, Planon or Corrigo gives a technical services team one place to schedule planned maintenance, raise work orders, track compliance and prove to a client that the work got done. For a provider delivering engineering maintenance across dozens of client estates, running without one isn't realistic.
SFG20 covers the maintenance itself. As the industry standard for building maintenance specifications, it sets out the tasks each asset type needs and how often, which gives teams a defensible answer to the question every auditor asks: why is this asset maintained at this frequency?
But both depend on something neither of them produces: the asset data itself. The CMMS stores that data, schedules against it and reports on it. SFG20 can only be applied to assets that are already recorded. Both assume the data arrives complete, structured and correct.
SFG20's own research shows how rarely that holds. In its 2026 report, just 15% of nearly 200 FM professionals said their asset registers were fully accurate, and half still keep at least part of their register in spreadsheets.
The expensive work happens between the site and the system
Here is the important distinction: storing asset data and capturing it are two different jobs. CMMS platforms were built for the first. The second still happens in spreadsheets, email attachments and somebody's evenings.
Picture what that looks like during a CMMS rollout. A surveyor walks a plant room and records each asset. Back at the office, an asset data lead extracts that data, rebuilds it in a spreadsheet to match the CMMS's required columns, and then adds 30 to 40 maintenance job lines per asset by hand. One UK technical services team spent weeks getting three sites to that point, with three more rollout phases still ahead.
Nothing about that process grows with you. Every new site adds the same manual effort, and every manual line is a chance for an error that someone then has to find. The person doing it usually carries this alongside their day job, which makes them the bottleneck for the entire rollout.
Those errors are not a quirk of FM. When researchers assessed 75 data sets from a wide range of organisations for a study published in Business Horizons, 47% of newly created records contained at least one critical error, and only 3% of the data sets met an acceptable quality standard.
Five signs your FM team has a data capture problem
If any of these sound familiar, the issue is not your CMMS. It is the layer feeding it.
Your asset register was reverse engineered from maintenance tasks
Plenty of providers inherit contracts with no reliable asset list, so they work backwards from the maintenance schedule. That gives you a list of tasks, not a register of assets, and every new contract starts from scratch.
Your maintenance frequencies don't match SFG20
If frequencies were set by habit or inherited from a previous contractor, they won't line up with the industry standard. That is an audit question waiting to happen, and it gets harder to answer the longer the gap stays open.
Every CMMS format change means remapping your exports
CMMS platforms evolve and required column headings and terminology change with them. When your capture process is a spreadsheet, every change means rebuilding the export by hand.
One person owns the upload and checks every line twice
When a single data lead is responsible for getting everything into the CMMS, they end up rechecking their own work line by line. It is slow and error prone, and it puts the whole rollout at the mercy of one person's calendar.
Writing in Harvard Business Review, data quality expert Thomas C. Redman calls this kind of work a hidden data factory: the checking and correcting people do to cope with data they don't trust. It adds no value, and he points to it as the basis for IBM's estimate that bad data costs the US economy $3.1 trillion a year.
Your sales team is selling reporting you can't produce yet
Clients increasingly ask for lifecycle and CapEx reporting. If procurement is selling it while the asset data underneath is incomplete, you risk getting caught flat-footed the first time a client asks to see the report.
Fix the capture layer and your CMMS starts paying back
Ninox doesn't replace your CMMS. It is the capture and validation layer that makes the CMMS investment pay off, and because Ninox is an AI-native low-code platform, your technical team builds that layer around the way they survey instead of bending their surveys around a spreadsheet.
In practice, surveyors capture assets on tablets in the browser, with photos and signature fields on the form. Office colleagues open the same record, check the photo or data plate remotely and complete the details. SFG20 codes, CIBSE Guide M life expectancy and NRM codes live in linked tables inside your own database, and triggers fill in the right maintenance data the moment someone picks an asset type. The job lines for each asset can come from the standard instead of from someone's keyboard.
When the data is ready, the Ninox REST API and XLSX export let your team package it in the format your CMMS expects. That connection is a custom build on the API, not an off-the-shelf connector, so when the CMMS changes its column headings, your team updates the mapping once instead of rebuilding a spreadsheet for every site.
Teams are already working this way. A UK facilities services team went from first build to paid licenses within four weeks of putting asset capture on Ninox. A UK building services consultancy has tracked thousands of meters as assets, with photos and settings, since 2020 and has expanded its licenses every year since 2022. Both built on a low-code platform with their own engineers, not an external development team.
Every new contract makes the capture gap wider
The pressure on asset data is only growing. UK government spending with FM firms reached £18 billion in FY24/25, up 9% in real terms since FY20/21, according to Tussell. Every new contract means another mobilization, another estate to survey and another asset register to load into the CMMS. In SFG20's 2026 report, 72% of FM professionals named asset management and maintenance as their top investment priority for the next three years.
Providers who fix the capture layer now can take on that growth without adding a data lead for every rollout. The ones who don't will keep pouring hours into manual uploads that never move the needle. Start with one site, build the capture database your surveyors need on a low-code platform your own engineers can maintain, and see how much of the upload work goes away.
Let's figure it out together.
