What is a fit-gap analysis?

A fit-gap analysis is the step between deciding you need a maintenance system and deciding which one. It puts two things side by side: the route a work order actually takes through your building today, and what a candidate system does when you install it and change nothing.

Everything that matches is a fit. Everything that does not is a gap, and a gap is not a failure. It is a decision with three possible answers.

The three answers a gap can have

You configure the system to match the process. You change the process to match the system. Or the gap is large enough that the system is ruled out.

The first two are both legitimate and we have recommended each of them. The third is the one that has to stay available, because a fit-gap that can only ever end in configuration is a procurement exercise with an outcome already written.

Why the comparison is against the work, not the brochure

A feature list tells you what a system can be made to do. It does not tell you how many steps a technician takes to close an order on a Tuesday afternoon with a radio in one hand.

That second number is the one that decides whether the system survives. We have walked into sites where the software was configured correctly, trained on once, and abandoned inside a quarter, because the work-order flow did not match how the crew moves through the building. The configuration was right against the specification and wrong against the route.

So the comparison runs against three things at once: what the crew does, what the operating standard requires, and what the system can actually carry.

What it produces

A written statement of what your system can carry and what it cannot, gap by gap, each with the decision attached and an owner against it. That document is what selection follows.

Where the system you already own can carry the standard, the answer is to keep it. That happens more often than a vendor will tell you, and it is the reason we hold no reseller agreement behind any recommendation we make.

What skipping it costs

Sites that skip the comparison do not avoid it. They perform it slowly, one configuration at a time, over the first year of ownership, without ever writing it down. Each change looks reasonable on its own. Together they are a system configured around an original mismatch nobody named, and the cost of unwinding it is the same work done later against live data and a crew that has already given up on the tool.