What Is a CAFM System?

What a CAFM system is. CAFM stands for computer-aided facility management: software built to run a building's day-to-day facility operations rather than just its equipment. That means maintenance work orders, but also floor plans and space allocation, occupancy and room bookings, a helpdesk for tenant or employee requests, and the contractors who show up to service everything. One record for the building, one place facilities teams work from.

What's included. A CAFM platform usually holds a digital floor plan tied to a CAD or BIM file, an asset register for the equipment in each space, a maintenance calendar and work-order queue, room and desk booking, a helpdesk for reactive requests, and contractor management: contracts, SLAs, and the vendors who hold them. Some add lease or move-management modules, though that territory belongs more to IWMS. The common thread is that CAFM ties the physical space to the people and assets inside it, not just the plant.

Where CAFM fits. Facility software splits into three rough tiers. CMMS handles maintenance and nothing else: work orders, planned maintenance, spares, labour. CAFM sits a level up, adding space, occupancy, helpdesk, and contractors to that maintenance core. IWMS sits above CAFM again, adding lease administration, capital projects, and portfolio-level real-estate management. The table below sets the three side by side.

Buying the right tier. Most of the confusion around CAFM comes from vendors blurring the lines: a CMMS vendor adds a helpdesk module and calls itself CAFM, or a CAFM vendor adds a lease register and calls itself IWMS. The category label matters less than matching the tool to the job. A team that only maintains equipment doesn't need space and occupancy modules sitting idle. A property team running leases and capital plans will outgrow CAFM and need the wider IWMS scope.

How FrostLogic Explore fits. FrostLogic Explore is a sensor-intelligence analytics layer, not a CAFM, CMMS, or IWMS system. It doesn't manage work orders, space, helpdesk tickets, or contractors, and it isn't positioned as a category product in any of these tiers. What it does is read the BMS, meter, and IoT data underneath a CAFM system and turn it into a prioritised, condition-based queue: the evidence a facilities team acts on, not the record-keeping layer they act inside. Explore reads the data a CAFM system runs on; it doesn't replace one.