Sold on eMaint, Canada Trade Services provider recommends it to its other customers

Ainsworth is one of Canada’s top integrated multi-trade companies. It provides end-to-end technical services, including equipment maintenance, HVAC, electrical, cabling for data transport, and high-voltage facility services. The company, headquartered in Toronto, employs approximately 1,500 tradespeople. Ainsworth’s expert technicians are dispatched through the company’s various regional offices to meet the maintenance needs of various commercial, industrial, institutional, and government facilities customers.

The first of the eMaint implementations began when Ainsworth won a contract to provide services to Alberta’s government-run school system and its 11 new facilities. Part of the maintenance management contract required installing a web-based CMMS robust enough to track and document maintenance activities, create reports, and categorize and prioritize work orders based on the level of severity. It also had to track critical school KPIs, including work order response times and completions, to ensure that its essential equipment stays up and running and that its facilities provide a safe and comfortable educational environment.

Felix Wong, manager of business process management at Ainsworth, worked with eMaint experts and his company’s operations department to acquire equipment data to satisfy each school’s technical requirements. Wong configured tables, screens, and workflows and met weekly with stakeholders to discuss eMaint functionality and make additions where needed. The Ainsworth team received in-person training and then provided training to each of the school representatives of the 11 schools.

After fulfilling the Alberta schools account requirements, the company and Wong adapted eMaint to fit five more new accounts to solve individual customer requests to address maintenance, administrative, management, or labor tracking problems.

Here are the challenges eMaint and Ainsworth helped conquer for each customer, plus the results and how the highly customizable CMMS benefited each organization and industry.

1. Cleaning Services: GDI Integrated Facility Services, with operations across Canada and the United States, provides premier janitorial services globally and owns Ainsworth. The parent company wanted to track work orders and requests for service using eMaint, but one of the requirements was to separate the GDI data from Ainsworth’s data. Together, Wong and the eMaint specialists quickly and easily created an independent CMMS account.

With customer job site information and contacts uploaded into the account, GDI leverages both the CMMS and Ainsworth’s call center to route calls to the appropriate staff and fulfill customer needs 24/7.

2. Communications: Ainsworth maintains and services the HVAC equipment of more than 1500 cell phone towers for Bell Mobility, part of Bell Canada. Beneath each tower is a small building containing critical electronics equipment, which must operate in a climate-controlled environment. Ainsworth is responsible for ensuring assets, such as those related to climate control, operate at peak performance.

Bell Mobility wanted visibility of overall maintenance and service activity. An account was created, and the communications company uses the CMMS dashboard to view preventive maintenance and service activity and gain insights via the dashboards built within eMaint. “The customer loves it,” Wong says.

3. Retail: McArthur Glen, a global designer retail company with several British Columbia outlets, needed a way to track and ensure monthly maintenance work order completions. An eMaint account was created and configured to automate PMs and create reports. McArthur Glen also uses the system to track work orders and labor.

4. Transportation: VIA Rail Canada, a government-run rail company, has more than 450 train stations spread across Canada. It wanted Ainsworth to alleviate it from managing individual stations’ administrative tasks and maintenance activity.

Ainsworth set up an eMaint account to help centralize and optimize administrative and maintenance tasks, including work orders, suppliers, and invoice management for the rail company.

5. Insurance: Farm Mutual keeps an operator onsite at its facility in Cambridge, Ontario. The company sought to improve maintenance activity tracking and labor performed by contractors. Ainsworth created PM schedules and configured eMaint to automatically generate work orders monthly and provide a comprehensive view of maintenance activity.

“We find that eMaint is a useful tool for us to quickly spin something up and be able to adjust those requirements. From our perspective, this is the strength of eMaint. It’s very flexible.”

– Felix Wong, manager of business process management, Ainsworth