30% More Efficient, 100% Sustainable: How MaintainX Is Scaling Maas Energy's Biogas Operations

Overview

Maas Energy Works specializes in developing, owning, and operating anaerobic manure digesters in partnership with dairy farmers and commercial facilities. Daryl Maas, president of Maas Energy Works, learned about digesters not by selling them to others but by building, owning, and operating them himself. Maas began working in cow power in Washington State with his brother. In 2010, Maas continued to expand by bringing Maas Energy Works to California to explore its renewable sector growth. Today, the company develops, builds, operates, and improves biogas projects across the United States.

Perhaps the biggest win for Maas is that Operations Directors consider MaintainX "a stable factor" in the company's growth, allowing them to confidently take on more projects based on “the incredible support" from its MaintainX account manager and the reporting features.

Challenges

Maas Energy owns and operates digester systems that local farmers can use to turn their waste into biogas.

According to Julie Lisea, Maas Operations Administrator, the specific digester equipment Maas uses is critical to the company’s ability to produce biogas. She explained, “We lose our project owners serious money when we have any unplanned downtime, so we take our equipment maintenance very seriously.”

• Asset Management: Before using MaintainX, the company was using a self-built system that wasn’t very scaleable and didn’t have most of the features MaintainX has. The company relied on spreadsheets and word-of-mouth to know what maintenance had been performed on what equipment. Ellis Jenné, Maas Systems Project Coordinator, recalled, "We weren't corporately documenting what we'd been doing at which sites. All of that information lived in people's heads.”
• Regulatory Compliance: Not surprisingly, Maas complies with regulatory requirements, including county permitting standards and air and water district needs. The company needs to track air and water data according to various time frames and, at any time, be able to prove it meets local and environmental standards. Before MaintainX, compiling historical records for regulatory and financial audits was difficult. “We had to provide pieces of information in various time frames, usually with urgency,” Julie noted. “We'd certainly spun our wheels in years past.”
• Parts Inventory Management: It wasn’t optimal tracking parts and inventory across multiple locations with individual spreadsheets. Julie said, “There were spreadsheets, and some people on site had a high radar for what we needed. But we were flying by the seat of our pants.”

“Since adopting MaintainX, we haven't had any of our networking equipment go down due to anything preventable. It’s hard to quantify exactly how much of an improvement it’s been.”
‍^{—Ellis Jenné, Maas Systems Project Coordinator}

Solutions

Since December 2021, Maas has used MaintainX for maintenance, operations, compliance, gas quality, fleet, and safety. In fact, gas quality is one of the most significant metrics used to determine revenue generation.

Julie recalled, “We started using MaintainX for daily checks. Then, we implemented it for weekly, monthly, quarterly, and now bi-annual checks. We require ourselves to follow the best industry practices.”

Accurate record-keeping with MaintainX helps Maas reduce downtime and improve customer relationships by demonstrating its steadfast commitment to maintenance and product quality.

Now, across four states and still growing, Maas creates MaintainX orgs to administer and manage work for its customers and partners. In addition to a remote office, Maas uses MaintainX across three time zones in the US to manage a trucking team, three plant teams, and two engine teams, all in the field from one remote office.

According to Julie, “The mobile capacity of MaintainX is why we picked it. Nobody wanted to use multiple systems. And it’s tough to get our guys in the field to sit down at their computers. The mobile capacity is essential.”

With 1300+ parts, 25,000+ work orders, and 2500 assets on MaintainX, Maas now experiences the following:

• Increased Customer Trust. By making visible its high standards of maintenance work via MaintainX, Maas has improved customer loyalty by being able to work more effectively with them. Ellis noted, “We can provide even more clients with an even better level of service. To say to them, ‘Hey, this is all the maintenance we've done this month for all these sites. These are the things we found. These are things we fixed.’”
• Better Control over Parts. With 47 meters to monitor, control, and visualize its process,  Maas uses MaintainX to prevent project shutdowns by better forecasting spare parts needs. “We’re able to reduce project downtime due to long lead times on spare parts orders because we can catch those things a lot sooner,” Julie said. “I run a parts report weekly on MaintainX. I can reconcile parts across four states in 20 minutes.” She went on, “When we do financial audits, we track all of our spare parts, how much they cost when they were ordered, where they're located.”
• Improved Company Standards. Using MaintainX’s Reporting module, Maas tracks work orders and incident history to constantly improve internal practices and site procedures. Julie said. “Now we circulate a really nice pdf of any incident work order, and we have a feedback loop for project development to improve our designs. That's been a huge initiative our CEO has been wanting for years.”

• Created a Single Source of Truth. Using MaintainX across sites and regions, Maas has brought its operations into one platform. Ellis recalled, “When I started, we were using a lot of different systems. Over here, we used one system, and over there, we used another. I wanted to find a way to centralize the systems. And I kept realizing more things we could with MaintainX,” Ellis explained. “We’ve been finding nice ways to keep as much information as possible in one place for people to utilize.” For example, in addition to using MaintainX for parts inventory, work orders, and reporting, Maas manages a 37-vehicle fleet and tracks maintenance using the Meters function to record odometer readings. Now, Maas drivers know when to get their vehicles serviced to keep insurance accurate and up to date.

• Improved Visibility across teams and locations. “With more visibility, we’ve grown our team internally,” Julie said. “We've been able to bring on new sites with a lot of ease because we know that, remotely from the office, we can give people an idea of what their workflow will be like on these sites. After all, we do have things documented and MaintainX.” Julie noted that “distance creates distortion, especially when dealing with remote teams,” but MaintainX provided visibility for everyone.
• Increased Productivity: MaintainX has made it much easier for Maas to assign work orders. “We can drag and drop work orders on the calendar into different schedules. We can work as a team now.” With MaintainX’s mobile accessibility, Maas field technicians are more productive. “The mobile capability was essential,” Julie said. “They can do more now that they can do it on the move. With MaintainX, we can outline very clearly what we as a team need to accomplish on a daily basis.”

“Operations Directors consider MaintainX ‘a stable factor’ in the company’s growth.”
^{—Julie Lisea, Maas Operations Administrator}

Results

In addition to automating its asset maintenance, Maas set up orgs in MaintainX to help bring on new customers and their sites. Julie noted, "We essentially built out the org for them and translated their needs into daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly procedures to help them document the work that we recommend as experts in the industry.” The result: MaintainX becomes the reference point for the work Maas and its customers do together.

Spotlight on the Customer

For decades, dairy farmers have faced a dual challenge: managing waste and missing out on a potential renewable energy source. That's where Maas Energy Works steps in, turning a problem into an opportunity with its innovative manure digester technology. Rather than allowing methane gas emissions to escape into the atmosphere, these digesters capture them, converting the manure into biogas—a potent, energy-rich fuel. This biogas is used to generate electricity, either for the grid or for onsite needs, and results in providing significant carbon credits while restoring balance to the ecosystem when generating renewable natural gas (RNG). With a track record spanning hundreds of thousands of operational hours across four states and over 60 farms, Maas Energy's projects are a testament to the practicality, cost effectiveness, and reliability of harnessing bioenergy in real-world settings.