Seven facility maintenance teams that improved operations with a CMMS: Examples and results

Managing facility maintenance can get complicated fast.

One day you’re juggling a flood of requests coming from your inbox, hallway conversations, and sticky notes, all marked ‘urgent’. The next day, you’re chasing down contractors, prepping for an audit, and fielding questions about why equipment is still down.

If that feels familiar, these stories are for you. They come from maintenance teams in distribution centers, facility management, and property management with huge gaps in their processes. Each team knew they needed a better solution than outdated software, spreadsheets, or paper. So, they turned to a modern CMMS that helped them respond faster, plan preventive work, and get real-time visibility into asset performance. 

Six ways facility maintenance teams are using a CMMS to improve operations

1. Cut repair time by making work history easy to access

In facilities, downtime not only means work delays, it also has an immediate impact on the people who rely on your services. The biggest downtime multipliers are usually the same: missing context, missing parts, and slow handoffs.

Michaels, the leading arts and crafts retailer in North America, was experiencing the impact of extended downtime at their seven distribution centers. Every repair took longer than it should because technicians couldn’t easily find information about equipment or update work orders. They changed that by adopting a CMMS and designing mobile-first workflows. This helped the team reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) by 70% and increase mean time between failure (MTBF) by 20%.

ColdTrack, a cold chain logistics center, was facing similar challenges and couldn’t afford any downtime for their clients. After rolling out a CMMS, the maintenance team was able to standardize procedures, capture more information on each work order, and build conditional workflows. The result was a 70% reduction in downtime.

The Villages Golf and Country Club was another team using a paper-based workflow, which meant they had little to no visibility into what work was completed and what wasn’t. Jobs would be missed weekly, which led to overwhelming backlog, complaints, and broken equipment. After implementing MaintainX, the team cut their work order execution from an average of two weeks to three days.

2. Increase efficiency by digitizing work requests

Facilities teams manage expectations just as much as they manage assets. If requests are coming in from multiple places with no standard format, it makes this job much harder. You end up spending half your day collecting, interpreting, and prioritizing these requests.

THIRA Health’s facilities manager faced these kinds of constant disruptions every day. He solved it by building a maintenance request portal with his CMMS, which centralized and standardized all maintenance requests. That shift helped the team get visibility on over 4,900 work orders, and communicate the volume and impact of work to leadership.

Cintas scaled the same idea across 200 sites by using QR codes to log work requests so anyone could submit an issue without being part of maintenance. Because the person who spots the issue was rarely the person responsible for fixing it, this reduced delays and repeat follow-ups.

The Public Works Department of the Cayman Islands went a step further. QR codes at public facilities allowed citizens to submit requests directly, improving responsiveness and creating a clearer trail from request to completion. For a team that used to rely on paper handoffs and manual updates, that visibility made it easier to keep work moving.

3. Shift from reactive to preventive work without adding chaos

Most facilities leaders want the same thing: fewer surprises. But if your schedule and records live in thousand-page binders or thousand-row spreadsheets, it’s nearly impossible to move from firefighting all day to a well-oiled preventive maintenance program.

Villages Golf and Country Club reduced reactive work by 30% and increased preventive work by 116% by trading paper for a CMMS, which allowed the team to track assets and spot troubling trends before they led to breakdowns or bottlenecks.

At THIRA Health, any routine maintenance automatically became a procedure in the CMMS, including daily rounds, monthly and annual inspections, inventory checks, and life-safety tasks. Over time, the ratio of reactive to proactive work orders improved from 13% to 36%.

Michaels used its CMMS to tie preventive work to leadership’s biggest priorities: less unplanned downtime and fewer emergency parts shipments. The difference was not just having PMs, but being able to consistently complete those PMs.

4. Make compliance and audits less painful

Audits are part of life for facility maintenance teams. But they often burn time when your team already has so little of it.

This was something ColdTrack struggled with. The team used to spend three months preparing for audits because records were scattered and inconsistent. After going paperless and attaching procedures, timestamps, and photos directly to work orders with its CMMS, the company reduced administrative load by over 40% and dramatically reduced audit prep time.

The Cayman Islands Public Works team faced a different version of the same problem: paper work orders and low visibility created delays and made reporting painful. After digitizing 75% of processes, monthly reporting that used to take hours could be done in minutes.

At THIRA Health, the maintenance team supported safety and security requirements. They digitized SOP checklists for tasks like onboarding and offboarding made it easier to run the right steps consistently and show that the steps were completed.

5. Better control of parts and purchasing spend

Parts inventory becomes a budget trap when managed by memory and spreadsheets. You end up with stockouts, rush shipping, and thousands of dollars sitting on storeroom shelves “just in case.”

ColdTrack cut parts costs by 70%, dropping from about $28,000 per month to under $10,000 per month. The maintenance team used its CMMS to track inventory usage in real time, setting limits, and using data to see when parts were being replaced instead of repaired.

Michaels used better planning and standard workflows to reduce emergency orders, including nearly eliminating next-day air shipments for critical spare parts.

At LUV Car Wash, the team moved away from spreadsheets and toward work history that made accountability possible. If a compressor continued to fail, the team could see if routine tasks, like draining or greasing, were actually completed, and whether failures were tied to missed maintenance.

6. Standardize work across sites and keep knowledge from walking out the door

If you manage maintenance at multiple sites, and every site does things differently, performance becomes impossible to compare and work is never done consistently.

Cintas was facing this problem on a huge scale at its 200 sites. The team wanted to implement a CMMS to help standardize work, but was worried that with so many sites, the project could drag on for months or years. However, with MaintainX, they were able to accelerate adoption, rolling out standardized maintenance procedures to all sites in just nine weeks, leading to increased levels of consistency and reporting visibility.

Michaels had similar goals across distribution centers. The team wanted to standardize asset and procedure naming, data inputs, and performance tracking to create a foundation for better decision-making and to reduce the risk of tribal knowledge leaving as technicians retire. They were able to set up a standard way to log maintenance work order history across nine distribution centers and are collecting more complete and useful data every day.

The same race to collect technician expertise is underway at the Public Works Department of the Cayman Islands. The maintenance department used its CMMS to migrate 15 years of data in four weeks and continued moving assets and locations into one system so teams could work from the same playbook.

Before and after: How MaintainX has helped facility maintenance teams solve big problems

Why MaintainX is the best CMMS for facility maintenance and distribution centers

Facility maintenance teams live in a world of nonstop requests, tight uptime expectations, and audits that demand proof. Here are five ways that MaintainX stands out as maintenance software best built to manage this work and solve those challenges:‍

1. Designed for frontline adoption and efficiency

Teams adopt MaintainX fast because it is mobile-first and simple to use in the flow of work. That matters in environments like Michaels, where technicians needed a system that made it easy to capture and retrieve data on the job, not after the fact.‍

2. Turns scattered requests into a trackable pipeline

When requests come through hallways, email, and phone calls, work gets missed and priorities get unclear. Teams like THIRA Health and Cintas used MaintainX to standardize intake, including QR code requests, so anyone can submit issues and maintenance can triage with context instead of guessing.

3. Makes preventive maintenance repeatable

Teams like THIRA Health used procedures and recurring schedules to shift from reactive firefighting toward proactive routines, improving completion speed and increasing preventive work.

4. Built for audit-ready compliance and proof

Facilities and distribution centers need more than checklists, they need evidence. ColdTrack and the Cayman Islands Public Works team relied on digital records, timestamps, and photo documentation to reduce admin effort and make reporting dramatically faster.

5. Scales across sites with standardization and visibility

Multi-site performance depends on consistent workflows and leader-level reporting. Cintas rolled out MaintainX across 200 sites quickly, and organizations like Michaels focused on standard naming, logging, and performance tracking so leaders can compare sites, spot gaps, and implement improvements.

The final word: A CMMS can be a force multiplier for facility maintenance teams

A CMMS is not just a system for logging work. In facilities, it becomes the operating system for uptime, compliance, and service levels.

If you are dealing with hallway requests, scattered records, and reactive firefighting, start with one goal: faster response time, higher PM completion, easier audits, or tighter parts control. Pick one building or one team, standardize the workflow, and let the data prove the impact.

When the system is easy enough for the frontline team to use every day, the results become repeatable across your portfolio.