Magnera Facility Saves $575k+ Per Year by Cutting Downtime With MaintainX

Key results

• Increased technical availability by 12%
• Reduced downtime by 12 hours per month, saving the company over $575k per year
• Better output with fewer technicians

Officially, Matt Harbin is a maintenance planner for Magnera’s manufacturing facility in Asheville, North Carolina. In practice, he wears many more hats. In addition to supervising and scheduling, he covers storeroom coordination and owns key reliability programs. 

Despite the workload, Matt has kept the plant reliable in an environment where skilled labor is hard to find and downtime is costly. He’s quick to share his secret to doing more with less: “If I didn’t have MaintainX, I couldn’t do these extra duties,” he says. “It would be crippling.”

Challenges

Limited performance visibility

Before MaintainX, the plant’s maintenance data wasn’t giving the team the clarity they needed. They could view KPIs like downtime and mean time to repair through their old system, but other insights were difficult to see or share.

Tension between teams

Without reliable, shared documentation about what was happening during PMs and downtime, disagreements between maintenance and production surfaced, particularly around how long repairs took. 

“We would get lopsided time, not only for our own department, but as a whole company,” Matt says. 

Slow communication

The old system made work order creation so complicated that some issues never got logged. This meant maintenance was reacting late or working from incomplete information.

“In the past, some of the production operators weren't putting in work orders. So they're telling the supervisor one thing, and the supervisor's trying to put in the work order, but they don't have time,” Matt says. 

The communication delays didn’t stop at work orders. Even when maintenance work was underway, details often surfaced too late to act on. Technicians would find a problem mid-PM, jot it down on paper, and only share the information after the inspection was finished. 

As Matt put it, they’d sometimes finish a PM and restart the line only to hear, “Why didn’t you fix that?” This wasn’t because the team missed the issue, but because they couldn’t relay the information soon enough to get the right parts in time.

Why MaintainX

Real-time collaboration

Matt saw MaintainX’s potential to reduce planning bottlenecks. Before, one person often held all the context and did all the coordination. Instead of juggling scattered updates and side conversations, he wanted a system where everyone could see the work in real time and contribute.

“My maintenance supervisor and the maintenance manager can also collaborate with me in MaintainX,” Matt explains. “And it’s so easy for all of us to use.”

Fast implementation

It was crucial that the rollout for a new system was simple, and MaintainX fit the bill. There wasn’t a long ramp or heavy lift to get ROI quickly. 

“I’ll continue to praise how easy it was to use, how easy it was to implement,” says Matt. “Day one we were up and running.”

Intuitive to scale without a “guru”

Just as important as speed to implementation was team adoption. Matt wanted a platform that technicians, supervisors, and production partners could use without calling a specialist. MaintainX lowered the learning curve.

“It’s not one of those programs that’s so difficult to navigate that no one else could participate,” Matt says. “I truly believe that tomorrow, if I had to leave and they brought someone else in, they’d get up and running pretty quick.”

For a team facing a tight labor market, that mattered. “You don’t have to be a guru with this,” he adds. “It’s just been so easy.”

Results

Measurable downtime reductions

In the roughly six months since implementing MaintainX, the team is already seeing a measurable drop in unplanned downtime.

“On average, we're probably looking at saving 12 hours a month of downtime just by using MaintainX. It's just been so much easier for us to communicate.”

The downtime reduction at this facility alone saves the company approximately $575k per year.

Matt also estimates that the system has boosted their technical availability by up to 12%.

“It's definitely created a sense of, ‘we're in preventive maintenance mode,’” says Matt. “Our technical availability is up, so now we can dive deeper into things. I truly believe that MaintainX helped us focus on that in such a short time. It's already paid massive dividends.”

Real-time communication

Instead of having to wait until a PM has closed or chase down updates, Matt and team now get notified of problems as they’re discovered and can respond immediately. For the production team, MaintainX makes it much easier to report issues.

“With MaintainX, we put QR codes on the machines. They can literally just walk up to it, scan it, put in a work order, and we’re done.”

Because it’s mobile-first, MaintainX also helps Matt stay connected to work orders and questions on the floor and off-site.

“I can answer a question immediately, or I can approve a request while I'm at home,” Matt explains. “I really enjoy that even from the middle of nowhere, I can get on MaintainX and do what I need to do.”

This smooth communication system keeps everyone on the same page, even when surprises hit. 

“If you come in on a PM day and something's happened or something's changed, like so-and-so didn't show up with the motor, it's super easy to get the information out to everybody.”

Maintaining output with fewer technicians

Matt credits MaintainX with his facility's continued productivity during a period of staffing loss.

“We have lost probably four techs since we started using this program, and our output is exactly the same. And these guys were skilled; we didn't want to lose them,” Matt says. “Even though we’ve lost personnel, MaintainX has helped us stay afloat.”

The system has also reduced the need for extra call-ins and contractors. Now, the plant has cut out contractors entirely in some cases, and Matt no longer requires his team to work overtime during outage windows.

“We’re just not using the resources we used to, because the information’s so much better,” Matt explains.

Better teamwork

With real-time documentation, the maintenance team finally has objective data on work completion. This has created a positive cultural shift for maintenance and production.

“MaintainX has given the maintenance department real hardcore numbers on how long we were out there and how much time we spent,” Matt explains.

That clarity removed a source of conflict. “It’s taken away the bitterness between departments,” he says. “And I believe it’s evaporated because there’s nothing to argue about. Everyone’s documenting their time. We know when the work started. We know when the work was completed. We have proof, we have pictures.”

These days, production feels more like a partner to maintenance. “I’ve listed some guys as users, and I’ll send comments to them so they’re seeing what’s going on. It’s really helpful for the production technicians who are trying to learn more about the machines. They’re able to access that information anytime they want, so they’ve learned a lot. We’re all supporting each other, and they see it’s a collaborative effort. So in that way MaintainX brought us together. Sounds cheesy, but it’s true.”

Higher quality work

Beyond time savings, MaintainX is helping technicians perform every job consistently by becoming the team’s go-to knowledge base. Instead of relying on printed procedures that tend to disappear, the team can capture their work with videos, photos, step-by-step instructions, and comments that stay tied to assets and the work orders.

With mobile-friendly checklists built into this system, technicians can see how tasks should be performed, which reinforces best practices around precision work, alignment checks, and torque specs.

“I believe in the accountability of checking things off on a digital checklist,” Matt says. “Most of the guys are comfortable with this format and being able to whip the phone out since they use it all the time anyway.”

That same “living library” is valuable beyond procedures, especially for parts. “I run into a lot of parts where there’s no nomenclature, no anything,” Matt says. “But if I know what machine the part goes to, I can go back to the work order. And if we documented everything properly, I can get that information again. So I use MaintainX as a library, and so do some of the other techs.”

Looking ahead 

Magnera plans to expand ROI by connecting MaintainX even more closely to parts and reliability analytics. The team is preparing to integrate SAP into MaintainX to improve parts visibility and decision-making.

“We’ve been getting ready to implement the SAP system for parts into MaintainX,” Matt says. “That would be absolutely fantastic.”

They also want to use MaintainX data to segment work by type and asset.

“The possibilities are endless, the data’s there,” Matt says.

Six months in, the verdict is already clear: MaintainX has given Matt’s maintenance team the speed and structure to reduce downtime and keep output stable (even with fewer hands on deck).

“It’s been a game changer for us,” Matt says. “I’d tell anybody that asks to go for it.”