How a Proterra Plant Saved $250K in Maintenance Costs with MaintainX

Proterra is the electrification partner for heavy-duty transportation and equipment manufacturers, producing battery solutions that perform in the toughest environments.

Four years ago, maintenance manager Ashley Edmond watched the production lines go in at Proterra’s new plant in Greer, South Carolina. Her job was to help establish the site’s maintenance operation, and MaintainX quickly became part of her plan to build a strong foundation for the team.

“When I started, the company hadn't had a true maintenance team for equipment before. A lot of their processes were done manually,” Ashley says. “So when they started this facility with all the automated equipment, our first suggestion was a CMMS.”

Challenges

When the integrators who installed the machinery at Proterra’s new plant left, valuable knowledge left with them. Ashley’s team received minimal documentation for its new equipment, so at first they struggled to repair the highly specialized automated systems. 

"It was very hectic. There were a lot of learning curves with the equipment, especially when the integrators left, and a lot of downtime." 

Ashley anticipated that without a centralized system that could capture asset knowledge, manage spare parts, and track work orders, the team would stay stuck in reactive mode, struggling to hit production targets and burning out on overtime.

Why MaintainX

Straightforward, modern design

Compared to other CMMS platforms the team vetted, MaintainX’s streamlined interface encouraged technicians to adopt it immediately. The ease of uploading photos to work orders and the ability to access reporting from a mobile device were among the deciding factors.

Dedicated partnership and commitment to innovation

From the start, the MaintainX team held regular meetings with Ashley's team to gather feature requests and feedback. These conversations led to functionality improvements that her team uses daily.

“What really brought us in was MaintainX's willingness to work with us. We would have monthly meetings where we'd share our ideas, and they'd push them back upline. We've seen a lot of things we needed come through.”

Results

Cost and downtime decreases

MaintainX has empowered the team to establish a proactive maintenance program, delivering $250,000 in cost savings through reduced downtime, better parts management, and more efficient labor use. 

The team has saved over 192 hours of unplanned downtime, and equipment availability has skyrocketed. “In the beginning, our downtime was probably more than half the shift. Our availability on the equipment is now at 92%.”

The success of their proactive measures has since compelled the team to start implementing condition-based monitoring through MaintainX, deploying vibration sensors to catch failures before they cause unplanned downtime.

“When we made the culture shift from reactive to proactive, starting to put in condition-based monitoring just made sense. If we can catch the failures before they occur, we're doing our jobs.”

A comprehensive knowledge base

The team used MaintainX to gather knowledge from the integrator handoff when the production line went up, and every troubleshooting step and procedure they developed along the way. 

Over four years, what started as work order notes grew into a complete library for the plant.

"The documentation we basically use as manuals today is everything that we've pulled out of MaintainX: work orders, procedures, and screenshots,” Ashley explains. “We didn't get a lot of documentation from the OEMs, so we built it ourselves inside the system."

Instant answers when every minute counts

One of Proterra's most critical pieces of equipment is their Module Adhesive Dispense station. This station has no redundant backup, and the epoxy it applies begins setting quickly. As soon as it goes down, the clock is ticking. 

MaintainX’s AI features have been critical for time-sensitive repairs like this. Instead of manually digging through years of work order history, technicians can ask MaintainX to instantly surface repair patterns and recommend next steps. 

“MaintainX AI has saved us a lot of downtime,” says Ashley. “We can ask it: when we see this issue, what are our normal responses? What are our past behaviors on how to fix the equipment?”

The team also uses MaintainX AI to identify failure drivers that inform their preventive maintenance schedules.

Team efficiency

MaintainX has also saved the team significant time. The maintenance crew previously worked on Saturdays and Sundays to keep up with PMs. Today, they complete their full PM schedules during the production week. 

"The team's time is better utilized now. They can focus on continuous improvement projects instead of breakdowns, so that's been a big win for us."

Data visibility

Ashley analyzes work orders to surface repeating issues, identify which repairs are taking too long, and pinpoint the top downtime drivers. She delivers those findings to the team in daily morning meetings as prioritized action items, a process that’s moved the maintenance culture away from firefighting.

MaintainX also gives the team a clear view into inventory stock levels, which has helped eliminate costly spare parts stockouts.

When presenting results to leadership, Ashley can easily pull metrics like availability, mean time between failure, mean time to repair, OEE, labor utilization, and total downtime from the platform. Because of this visibility, the business case for subsequent maintenance initiatives has been easy to make.

“The data speaks for itself,” Ashley says. 

Looking ahead

Proterra's next major maintenance initiative is completing the full Ignition OT integration with MaintainX, which will allow the team to trigger PMs based on equipment usage rather than calendar schedules. Ashley plans to use this data to eliminate unnecessary maintenance and focus the team's efforts where they matter most.

The team is also exploring integration with Proterra's iProcurement Oracle system to streamline the purchase order process.

The plant’s journey from an empty building to a proactive, cost-efficient operation is a powerful example of what's possible when maintenance teams can access the right data at the right time.