Eight examples of manufacturers that improved uptime, cost efficiency, and more with a CMMS

There’s a huge difference between knowing your problems and solving them. Most maintenance teams know which machines break down the most or that their backlog is growing too quickly. But it’s hard to tackle these issues when they're being stopped in the hallways with work requests, spending hours writing schedules on a whiteboard, or running between the office and the plant floor.

If these roadblocks are resonating with you, you can take some hope (and inspiration) from the stories in this article. They’re the accounts of maintenance teams that knew there was a better way, went looking for a solution, and found a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) that helped them achieve their goals. Read on to find out how eight manufacturers reduced downtime, cut costs, increased preventive maintenance, and more with maintenance software.

Five ways manufacturers used a CMMS to improve production, efficiency, and more

Cut downtime and repair time

Every minute of unplanned downtime is expensive. Two of the biggest sources of extended downtime are troubleshooting and missing parts. Many teams lose hours hunting for the reason behind a breakdown and the right part to fix it. 

Zeta Energy, a manufacturer of lithium sulfur batteries, felt this exact pain. Without dependable records, diagnosing issues took weeks, and the team often didn’t have the right inventory on hand as they bounced between spreadsheets, paper, and finance tools that weren’t built for maintenance.

"We were using all these systems that weren’t designed for maintenance at all,” says Mourad Hassan, Zeta’s Director of Operations and Safety, “and they would ultimately just produce a piece of paper that didn’t have the information we needed. We didn’t have a system that tied it all together."

With MaintainX, Zeta flipped the script. It allowed them to build historical maintenance and inventory records that helped them diagnose and resolve failures quickly.

“MaintainX has definitely improved our overall downtime and response time in the last three years," says Mourad.

"We’re able to diagnose issues quicker because we have all the information from similar incidents in MaintainX. What used to take us weeks to understand and fix now takes a few short hours or sometimes minutes.”

Cardinal Glass, a laminated glass manufacturer, saw similar results with their CMMS, which helped them reduce unplanned downtime by 60%.

Interroll is another manufacturer that used a CMMS to improve reaction time by 15%, which helped reduce downtime by up to 20% on their equipment. They used QR codes and mobile maintenance software to reduce the time it took to create, prioritize, and assign maintenance requests.

Reduce maintenance costs

Out of control maintenance costs can often be traced back to one line item: parts inventory. Emergency orders, missing parts, and dead stock raise maintenance spend. Then there’s the indirect cost of downtime while you wait for a part or install a component that doesn’t match the asset and leads to a breakdown. 

These challenges were familiar to Wauseon Machine, a manufacturer that was stuck managing inventory with a paper-based process, which limited visibility on what it had on its storeroom shelves.

Once they implemented MaintainX, they were able to improve parts inventory tracking and forecasting. This allowed them to avoid rush orders and reduce inventory costs by 14.5%, totalling over $60,000 in savings annually.

Redimix, a concrete manufacturer, saw similar results after implementing a CMMS. The maintenance team was able to reduce winter maintenance costs by 66% and total maintenance spend by 53%. Most importantly, they didn’t just spend less, they were able to do more, which has had a significant impact on the company’s bottom line.

“We’ve done more maintenance than we’ve ever done before—with a significant cost reduction,” says Greg Wortman, the operations manager at Redimix. “This means we’ve been able to expand our profit margin.” 

‍Increase preventive maintenance and asset reliability

Manufacturers rely on uptime, asset availability, and quality production every minute of every day to keep their businesses running. One of the surest ways to keep equipment running at peak performance is by doing more preventive maintenance, finding failures before they cause breakdowns, and correcting them quickly and efficiently.

Cardinal Glass is one example of a manufacturer who boosted preventive maintenance with a CMMS. The team completed 70% more preventive maintenance work orders after implementing maintenance software while improving on-time completion by 14%.

Those results are great, but they make less of an impact if others in the company aren’t aware of them. That’s why Derrick Tuft, Cardinal Glass’s maintenance manager, used his CMMS to build reports that showcased the impact of preventive maintenance, highlight his team’s success, and advocate for more time and resources.

“I like to show off the number of PMs that were created versus completed. It really paints a true picture of what's going on.”

PharmaNZ, a pharmaceutical manufacturer, made an even sharper improvement. The company used a CMMS to increase preventive maintenance work by 200%, which allowed the team to reduce its reliance on outside contractors. Not only did this help maintenance catch small problems before they became big ones, it also led to a $70,000 drop in maintenance costs.

Simplify compliance and reduce audit prep time

Audit readiness and compliance tracking is essential for most manufacturers. It can also be an incredible drain on resources. Fortunately, the process of proving work was done by the right person, at the right time can be streamlined with a CMMS.

Cardinal Glass is proof of this. The maintenance team saved an average of six hours per audit after adopting MaintainX.

For PharmaNZ, audit prep meant sorting through dozens of binders and lots of uncertainty before the company started using maintenance software. Now, the maintenance team can hand auditors a complete audit trail created through the platform, complete with procedures, signatures, due dates, comments, photos, and audit logs. This has helped the company save up to four hours for every GMP audit.

“Paperwork was our biggest hamstring,” says Scotty Death, Chief Operations Officer at PharmaNZ. “Even with all the records on hand, we weren’t always sure if the information would be enough for the auditor.”

“Now, with MaintainX,…when the auditor looks at it, they barely ask me any questions.” 

For Interroll, it wasn’t just about faster, more complete audits, but also about consolidating compliance tools. Having a CMMS allowed the team to prepare for audits, manage total productive maintenance initiatives, and complete quality checks in a single system. They were able to drop multiple systems and save thousands.

Standardize work and improve visibility, training, and planning

Many manufacturers struggle to standardize work across sites and capture the right knowledge to be as efficient as possible at multiple plants. This pain is often felt most in maintenance, where know-how is usually trapped in people’s heads or in scattered files no one trusts. 

Zeta Energy called out this problem directly. 

“We didn’t have a lot of visibility into our work or our parts,” says Mourad.

After implementing MaintainX, the Zeta team gained real-time visibility into their operations and were able to build an in-depth record of best practices for their equipment.

"Every single thing you do, every work order, every purchase order, is tracked. I know about all the parts used, the SOPs, and can see the frequency of everything," explains Mourad.

"If something did happen, and if there was an accident, I can use MaintainX to go back and track the activities that took place, who did them, and get to the root cause.”

Redimix leaned into the same idea. They used their CMMS to build SOPs as a central knowledge repository so employees operate and repair equipment consistently. That knowledge hub even expanded who they could hire and train.

Hypertherm is another manufacturer that uses a CMMS to standardize work at the task level. The maintenance team embeds procedures into every PM so even a new technician can go step-by-step, and leaders get better capacity planning via mobile time tracking.

Future Foam, a maker of foam materials, was struggling to capture the information it needed to standardize work because their legacy software “needed 100 clicks to close one work order.” Once the company switched to MaintainX, the maintenance team was able to use templated procedures to capture tribal knowledge and reduce reliance on technician-to-technician training.

Before and after: How MaintainX has helped manufacturers solve big problems and get bigger results

The top-four maintenance software features manufacturers rely on

For many of the manufacturers in this article, the first CMMS they tried wasn’t the one that gave them the best results. When they did find success, it was in large part due to these four capabilities:

1. Ease of use for frontline teams‍

Adoption is the number-one indicator of success with a CMMS. If no one uses the software, it doesn’t matter how many features it has. That’s why ease of use was a top priority for all the manufacturers in this article, especially when it came to frontline workers.

As Greg from Redimix says, “As long as you know how to take a picture on an iPhone…you can use MaintainX.”

2. Mobile workflows

Maintenance workflows break down on the plant floor when a CMMS is only available on a stationary computer or has a mobile app that is just a copy of the desktop app. A really good mobile app allows teams to capture details at the asset in real time, like manuals, past work orders, photos, videos, notes, and context that reduce back-and-forth and accelerate repairs. 

Interroll is one example of why this is so important. They used MaintainX to create a digital work request process, which cut response times significantly.

3. Reporting and visibility that make maintenance measurable

You can’t improve what you can’t see. Manufacturers that improved uptime and reduced costs consistently pointed to having reliable maintenance data, like work history, critical KPIs, inventory counts, and scheduling visibility, in one place. 

Redimix in particular called out finally having the tools to track OEE accurately, enabling clearer accountability and better prioritization.

4. Next-level onboarding and continuous vendor support

Even the best CMMS can fail if implementation stalls or users don’t feel supported. What stood out in these stories was the importance of onboarding that gets teams live quickly and ongoing vendor support that feels like a partnership. 

Hypertherm noted that MaintainX support was “really quick to help,” and Future Foam described a notably consultative experience compared to typical software sales, “The MaintainX rep came to the table and simply asked, ‘How can I help?’”

The final word: A CMMS can be a manufacturer’s biggest advantage

Across the eight manufacturers in this article, the pattern is clear: a CMMS helps teams move from knowing what’s wrong to actually fixing it—faster and with less chaos.

With MaintainX, teams cut downtime and response time, reduced parts and maintenance spend, increased preventive maintenance, and made audits far less painful. Just as importantly, they standardized work and captured tribal knowledge so maintenance becomes repeatable across shifts and sites. 

If you’re dealing with hallway requests, paper work orders, or unreliable records, start with one goal—downtime, costs, PMs, or compliance—and choose a CMMS your frontline team will actually use.