Buttonworks and maintenance software
Maintenance management software is the right tool for a maintenance director, and this page is not an argument against owning one. It is an argument about where a work order comes from, because every CMMS starts at the moment somebody sits down and types one.
Where a CMMS works well
- Preventive maintenance schedules, asset life, parts inventory, and warranty tracking are real work, and a CMMS does them properly.
- It produces the evidence trail that compliance and insurance ask for.
- It is where a boiler belongs. Buttonworks has no opinion about boilers.
Where it runs out
- The resident cannot reach it. Somebody has to already know about the problem and enter it, and that step is where requests are lost.
- The unit of work is an asset. "Mrs Alvarez would like an extra blanket" does not model as an asset fault, so it never gets entered.
- It is one department. Dietary, nursing, housekeeping, and activities are not in it, and a resident's request does not arrive pre-sorted by department.
- Getting people to use it is the whole project. Vendor implementation guides lead with leadership buy-in, a full asset inventory before launch, and training to get accurate data entry. That is a large change programme for a floor with 42% annual turnover.
- It is another system to connect. Across more than 1,000 senior living operators and executives surveyed in 2025, interoperability between software tools was the top challenge at 77%, and 74% named a lack of demonstrable return as a barrier to adopting anything new.
Side by side
| CMMS | Buttonworks | |
|---|---|---|
| Where a work order starts | A staff member types it in | A resident says it in their own words |
| What it is about | An asset | A person, or an asset |
| Departments | Usually maintenance | Any team the facility configures |
| Preventive maintenance | Yes, and it is good at it | No |
| Parts and inventory | Yes | No |
| Resident hears back | No | In the same chat, in their language |
| Training to adopt | A project | Nothing for residents. One screen for staff |
What happens with Buttonworks
- The intake is the product. A message becomes a titled, described, prioritised, routed work order without anyone retyping it.
- Teams are whatever the facility says they are, so the same request stream serves dietary and maintenance equally.
- The resident is told which team picked it up, which is the part a work-order system normally has no way to do.
- When the classification is not confident, the request waits in a review queue for a human instead of being routed wrongly.
If you already run a CMMS, keep it. The gap it leaves is upstream: everything a resident says out loud that never becomes a ticket at all.
Buttonworks is in early access. Statistics on this page are cited on the Sources page. See the other comparisons, or what Buttonworks does.
About · Privacy Policy · Terms of Service · Sources · Accessibility · contact@buttonworks.co