What is a CAFM System?
CAFM (computer-aided facilities management) software helps FM teams manage maintenance, assets, and workspace. This guide explains what a CAFM system does, what it's used for, and where it stops.
In short
A CAFM (computer-aided facilities management) system is software that helps facilities teams plan, manage, and record maintenance, assets, and building services. It typically handles work orders, planned maintenance schedules, asset registers, and reporting in one place.
What a CAFM system does
A CAFM system is the operational backbone of a maintenance team. It schedules and tracks planned preventive maintenance, logs and routes reactive jobs, holds the asset register, manages contractors, and produces the reports and compliance records management needs. By centralising work management, it replaces spreadsheets, paper job sheets, and disconnected diaries with a single auditable system.
- Planned maintenance (PPM) scheduling, often built from SFG20
- Reactive work order management and helpdesk
- Asset registers and maintenance history
- Contractor and SLA management
- Compliance reporting and audit trails
How CAFM relates to PPM and O&M data
A CAFM system is where PPM schedules live as recurring work orders, often loaded from an SFG20 library. It records that maintenance happened and stores the resulting history. What it generally does not do well is hold and surface the deep technical content of the O&M manuals — the manufacturer instructions, drawings, and specifications an engineer needs to actually carry out a task. CAFM tells you a job is due and records that it was done; the O&M documentation tells you how to do it.
Where CAFM stops
CAFM is excellent at managing work and assets but is not designed to be a searchable technical knowledge base. When an engineer on a job needs a specific setting, an isolation point, or a wiring detail, that information sits in O&M PDFs that the CAFM system may link to but cannot search in plain language. Closing that gap is what an AI document assistant does — and where the assistant and the register are the same system, the schedule that raised the job and the manual that explains it are one search apart, so the engineer gets the answer without leaving the job to dig through folders.
Free tools for this
Compliance & CAFM
Keep every statutory duty on one register
PM Assist sets up the compliance register for each building from its property type, then plans the maintenance and inspections that keep it current.
- Each duty sits on the compliance register, showing when it was last done, when it is next due and the certificate behind it.
- Duties with no record held are listed as gaps, so nothing is missed just because nobody logged it.
- AI reads your certificates and proposes the dates and remedial actions; a person checks them against the source document before they count.
Sources
The regulatory positions on this page come from the following primary sources. Where guidance and legislation differ, the legislation governs — always confirm the requirements that apply to your own site and jurisdiction.
Frequently asked questions
What does CAFM stand for?
What is the difference between CAFM and a CMMS?
Does a CAFM system replace O&M manuals?
Is PM Assist a CAFM system?
A compliance register and PPM with the O&M manuals built in
PM Assist runs the compliance register, planned maintenance and inspections for each building, and makes the O&M documentation behind every asset instantly searchable.
- Upload and organise building documentation
- AI-powered search across all your manuals
- Source-cited answers for every query
- Team collaboration and access control
- No credit card required to start
Knowing the standard is one thing. Finding it in the paperwork is another.
Ask an O&M manual a question and get the answer back with the page it came from. No signup, and you can drop in your own PDF instead of the sample.
“When was the last F-Gas check?”Runs against a sample chiller manual so you can see the shape of the answer — then try it on one of yours.