How Dolese Bros Cut Downtime, Parts Costs, and Repeat Failures by Connecting MaintainX to Ignition

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Dolese Bros was at risk of becoming a victim of its own success.

After 120 years of consistent growth, the company has become one of the largest manufacturers of construction materials and aggregates in North America. But as production increased, it crowded out scheduled maintenance on equipment, causing more and more unplanned downtime.

Ryan Bennett, a Reliability Maintenance Specialist at Dolese, knew this trend needed to be reversed. He also knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Not only was it difficult to coordinate maintenance with a heavy production schedule, the team also had to contend with creating preventive maintenance plans for a wide range of equipment across dozens of facilities, some that had been operating for nearly 100 years. Plus, the team mostly used spreadsheets and paper to track work.

It was clear the Dolese maintenance team needed a change. That’s why they started an ambitious initiative to connect asset and work data in MaintainX so the team could do the right maintenance at the right time.

Challenges

Reactive maintenance was leading to more breakdowns and higher costs

The Dolese team was running at 95% reactive maintenance before MaintainX, according to Ryan. Because demand increased year after year, machines ran longer and harder than they were engineered for. Equipment couldn’t keep up and breakdowns became more and more common.

"Our company slogan is Dolese Delivers. We take that very seriously,” says Ryan, “but we were probably 95% reactive. We were doing more repair than maintenance.”

Emergency maintenance also led to a reactive inventory strategy where parts weren't ordered until something broke. This only increased the amount of time equipment was down and increased costs.

PMs were outdated, ineffective, and hard to track

Technicians were using paper work orders to complete preventive maintenance, which made it difficult to keep consistent records. Issues flagged during inspections were getting lost or forgotten, which led to even more downtime and longer repair times.

"When I say we were doing PMs the old fashioned way, I mean it,” says Ryan. “We had Word and Excel documents that we printed and handed to technicians. We had no traceability."

Preventive maintenance was also scheduled using calendar intervals, not run hours. As production demands increased and machines ran longer, PM intervals weren't updated to match, resulting in major failures that required complete rebuilds or replacements.

Maintenance couldn’t act on sensor data

The company had implemented Ignition to capture asset data, but for the maintenance team to access it, they had to call automation specialists to pull PLC readings or manually navigate tag browsers. This was time-consuming and required specialized know-how, making it impractical for technicians and leaving the team operating without key equipment data.

Team knowledge was quickly disappearing

Maintenance technicians with 20+ years of experience were leaving and taking their expertise with them. Without a system to capture and centralize what those experienced workers knew, the team was constantly starting from zero. This meant that fewer people knew the signs of oncoming failure and equipment issues that were usually spotted early were being missed.

A lack of standardization increased operational complexity

Maintenance was being done differently at each facility, with different workflows, data requirements, and procedures. Some sites made decisions based on sensors, while others didn’t even have that infrastructure. This meant that finding a starting point for standardization and improving maintenance maturity was difficult.

Why MaintainX

Usage-based maintenance scheduling

MaintainX gave Dolese the ability to trigger PMs based on asset run hours instead of fixed dates, helping solve the problem of under and overmaintaining equipment. This allowed the team to create preventive maintenance plans that accounted for variable production schedules and made it easier to advocate for proactive maintenance.

"The only way to continue to deliver was to focus on converting to a proactive state,” says Ryan. “We needed to make sure that when you hit the start button, the asset runs until you hit the stop button."

SCADA connectivity with an Ignition integration

MaintainX's native connection with Ignition, MQTT brokers, and Kepware was central to bringing sensor data directly into the maintenance workflow. The integration was easy to implement without consuming a lot of maintenance, engineering, or IT resources. The Dolese team liked that MaintainX could trigger work orders from a machine signal, capture the resolution, and make repair history searchable across the organization.

"I wanted to have meter readings for every piece of equipment available for technicians…even if they were standing on a catwalk 40 feet in the air with nothing but a phone and screwdriver," says Ryan

Mobile accessibility

Ryan and team liked that MaintainX enabled frontline staff to access information, complete work, and log data from the field with minimal changes to existing workflows. Technicians can instantly view meter readings, manuals, BOMs, RCA findings, and work order history on their phones in the field.

In-depth reporting on asset health

Maintenance leaders at Dolese wanted to easily see equipment performance and make decisions based on the data. MaintainX delivered these capabilities with dashboards that show assets that generate the most work orders and downtime, which power the Pareto analysis Ryan uses to prioritize RCA work and other key decisions.

AI-powered maintenance workflows

Ryan and the maintenance team saw a lot of value in the MaintainX AI features, especially the ability to surface information from equipment manuals to help technicians with troubleshooting questions in the field.

Results

Increased maintenance efficiency

The maintenance team now schedules preventive maintenance on all fleet equipment based on run hours or miles, and are transitioning all fixed assets to usage-based triggers. They’ve also automated some workflows based on sensor data. When a value goes outside normal ranges, a work order is triggered in MaintainX so technicians can investigate, diagnose, and schedule corrective work if needed.

This change has helped Dolese catch and fix equipment failures before they lead to breakdowns. It’s also helped allocate the right resources to the right machines, improving team efficiency and keeping production on schedule.

“MaintainX allows us to be incredibly precise with our maintenance program, down to the minute if we want to,” says Ryan

Less downtime

Another benefit of using sensor data to catch equipment issues early is the team is able to verify parts availability, stage the job, and schedule the repair during non-production hours. This has significantly reduced downtime caused by waiting on parts and the number of costly emergency purchases.  

Fewer repeat failures

Ryan and his team have created several reports in MaintainX that allow them to track asset health and run Pareto analyses. This helps them identify bad actor assets, conduct RCAs, replace problem components, and address backlog maintenance. The result is fewer repeat failures, fewer big breakdowns, and better insight to help the team perform repairs without disrupting production.

"The reporting in MaintainX has been able to point us to the 20% of bad actors in our equipment,” says Ryan. “That’s been super useful to see where to focus our efforts and invest resources in reducing that downtime.”

Improved team morale

Moving away from constant firefighting has reduced technician stress and frustration, says Ryan. Now that technicians have the right tools and information through MaintainX, they can do their jobs with more confidence and with fewer obstacles. 

"I believe having MaintainX and connecting workers with everything they need to be successful has increased our ability to retain good employees," says Ryan. 

Better communication between operators and maintenance

Operators at Dolese are using MaintainX to do daily and weekly inspection, with meter readings surfaced directly inside checklists. Instead of writing down values by hand, live sensor value is automatically filled, and operators confirm them. This allows operators to be more involved in maintenance, flag issues earlier, and create reliable data the maintenance team can use to keep machines running.

What's next

Dolese’s next priority is scaling its condition-based maintenance program across its remaining sites. By standardizing naming conventions, tag structures, and logic blocks, the team aims to make each rollout close to “copy and paste” with only slight tweaks from site to site.

The team also wants to expand into vibration analysis, starting with critical assets with long repair times or hard-to-source parts. Dolese plans to combine sensor data with MaintainX AI to identify anomalies and automate maintenance workflows.

Dolese is also focused on strengthening the fundamentals of its maintenance program. The team is returning to OEM-recommended service intervals to reduce premature failures, while tracking leading indicators such as PM skip rates, inspection flag and fail rates, and work order completion. Over time, the goal is to move toward condition-based maintenance and improve OEE availability.