Hiring a maintenance director in the context of implementing a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) is a major strategic challenge for an SME. Unlike a traditional hire, it's not just about filling an operational role, but about integrating a leader capable of structuring, transforming, and modernizing the organization's maintenance practices.

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Summary

1. Why a CMMS Project Changes the Desired Profile
2. The Dual Profile: Maintenance Expertise and Project Management
3. Integrating a Maintenance Director into an Industrial SME
4. Attracting This Profile: An Attractiveness Challenge
5. Successful Implementation Without Creating Rigidity
6. Championing a Long-Term Reliability Vision
7. Thorens Talents Support
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Key Takeaways

• The CMMS project redefines the role: Implementing a CMMS is not an IT project; it's a transformation of maintenance management, and the maintenance director is the project lead, not just a user.
• The right time: Recruiting the director before or during the CMMS selection allows for proper structuring of the asset hierarchy and maintenance plans, rather than inheriting a poorly configured system.
• Rare dual profile: The candidate must combine on-the-ground credibility, equipment knowledge, reliability, and the ability to structure data and lead change. This combination is rare.
• The real risk is adoption: Most CMMS failures don't stem from the software itself, but from data quality and technician buy-in, two dimensions directly under the director's leadership.

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Many Quebec industrial SMEs still manage their maintenance with spreadsheets, paper logs, and the memory of their most experienced technicians. The introduction of a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) signals a desire to professionalize this function. However, the software alone doesn't solve anything.

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At Thorens Talents, we observe a recurring mistake: companies treat the implementation as an IT deployment, purchase the solution, and then look for "someone to make it run." The sequence is reversed. It's the maintenance director who determines whether the CMMS becomes a true management tool or a database that no one feeds. Recruiting this profile, often called a maintenance director, manager, or supervisor depending on the SME's size, is the real key to success, much more so than choosing the license.

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Why a CMMS Project Changes the Desired Profile

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A CMMS only structures what the maintenance organization already knows how to do. If the function is immature, reactive, poorly documented, without equipment hierarchy or maintenance ranges, the software only amplifies the disorder by digitizing it. The implementation therefore reveals a need that the company had not formalized: someone capable of defining asset criticality, equipment hierarchy, and preventive maintenance plans.

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Expectations unfold across two distinct horizons. In the short term: deploy the tool, ensure work orders are entered, and ensure the reliability of master data. In the medium term: shift the company from reactive to preventive maintenance, establish performance indicators, and build a culture of reliability.

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The recurring dilemma:
• Recruit a technical expert who masters the equipment but underestimates data structuring and change management?
• Or a project manager capable of leading the implementation but lacking credibility on the shop floor?
Candidates capable of covering both dimensions are rare. The most frequent risk is the mismatch between experience gained in a large, already equipped organization and the reality of an SME starting from scratch.

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The Dual Profile: Maintenance Expertise and Project Management

The maintenance director hired in this context simultaneously plays two roles that few profiles combine.
On one hand, on-the-ground credibility: understanding equipment, engaging with technicians as equals, prioritizing breakdowns based on their real impact on production. Without this legitimacy, no instructions will be followed. On the other hand, data and process discipline: coding equipment, building a coherent hierarchy, defining maintenance ranges and work order triggers, and then establishing rigorous data entry.

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A candidate strong only in technical skills will configure a tool that no one maintains. A candidate strong only in management will design an elegant system disconnected from the reality of the shop floor. It's the intersection that creates value, and that's precisely what a serious recruitment process aims to measure.
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Integrating a Maintenance Director into an Industrial SME

In an SME, much of the maintenance know-how resides with a few key individuals. The introduction of a CMMS is often seen as a challenge: "we've never needed that to do our job." Logging interventions is perceived as surveillance, not as a tool.

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The director must first establish credibility on the shop floor and demonstrate that the CMMS serves the technicians—leading to less crisis management, fewer recurring breakdowns, and parts available at the right time—before imposing it as an administrative burden. Buy-in is earned through proof, not by directive.

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From management's perspective, SME owners have often managed maintenance informally, based on judgment. Delegating this responsibility requires clarifying governance: who decides maintenance priorities, who arbitrates between production and preventive maintenance, and what budget is allocated. Without this framework, the director becomes responsible for results without the corresponding decision-making leverage.

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Attracting this Profile: A Challenge in Attractiveness

SMEs are in direct competition with larger manufacturers for these profiles: higher salaries, dedicated Industry 4.0 budgets, and already established maintenance teams. The gap in resources is real.
But the position in an SME offers an appeal that large organizations cannot match: building the maintenance function from a blank slate, structuring a CMMS from the ground up according to one's own logic, and directly measuring its impact on equipment availability. It's a project, not just managing existing operations.

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The cost of a bad hire is particularly high in this context. A poorly configured CMMS, with a bad hierarchy, inconsistent coding, and polluted data from the start, often needs to be rebuilt, which leads to a loss of technician trust and frequently results in the tool being abandoned in less than a year. At Thorens Talents, our role is to present a motivating company project to passive candidates, not just a job opening.

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Successful Implementation Without Creating Rigidity

The recruited director is expected to deliver concrete and rapid gains. Candidates who arrive with a multinational framework ready to apply almost systematically fail: they build a structure that is oversized for the reality of an SME.

‍The Balancing Act:

Start with critical equipment rather than trying to catalog everything at once, and build an asset hierarchy proportionate to the actual size of the fleet.

• Establish data discipline from day one: without reliable data, indicators are worthless.
• Implement indicators that resonate with management: availability rate, MTBF (mean time between failures), MTTR (mean time to repair), preventive/corrective ratio, preventive maintenance schedule adherence rate, without turning maintenance into a reporting exercise.

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Those who succeed understand that every SME has its own change tolerance thresholds. Formalization should be seen as a help, never as bureaucratization.

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Foster a long-term reliability vision

Beyond deployment, the director must translate production and availability ambitions into a maintenance strategy. A well-fed CMMS is not an end in itself: it's the data foundation that allows the company to evolve from reactive to preventive, then to predictive maintenance, maintenance based on the actual condition of equipment, supported by sensors and Maintenance 4.0.

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In an SME, this vision is rarely documented; it often relies on the owner's intuition. Making it explicit and shared is a demanding exercise. Successful transitions are those where management and the maintenance director align on a reliability trajectory even before starting the role, rather than discovering their differences during the project.

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How Thorens Talents supports this type of mandate

Recruiting a Maintenance Director in a CMMS implementation context requires a very different approach than traditional advertising. The target profiles are already employed, not highly visible, and in high demand.

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What we offer:

• A leadership assessment beyond the CV: field credibility, ability to drive change, aptitude for structuring data in a way proportionate to an SME.
• An active network of passive candidates who have already led a comparable maintenance digitalization, and not simply used an existing CMMS.
• Comprehensive support, from profile definition to integration follow-up, aligned with the actual CMMS project timeline.

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It's not about hiring just another competent technician. It's about choosing the leader of a transformation that will determine equipment performance for years to come.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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Should the maintenance director be hired before or after choosing the CMMS?

Ideally, before or during selection. They are the one who defines the asset hierarchy, maintenance plans, and coding logic. Inheriting a system already configured by an integrator without a maintenance vision often leads to a costly overhaul and a loss of team confidence. Hiring first ensures the tool is built around the strategy, not the other way around.

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Which profile should be prioritized: a technical expert or a project manager?

In SMEs, practical credibility is non-negotiable, but it's not enough. The ability to structure data and lead change must be evaluated with the same rigor as technical expertise. The ideal candidate has already led a CMMS implementation from start to finish, not just worked with an existing CMMS.

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