How Coast Streamlines Facility Maintenance for Multi-Site Teams

Sébastien Grenier starts every morning the same way. He opens Coast and sees everything happening across all three of the lumber plants he oversees in Montreal, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. If a pump is leaking at his Newfoundland location, he knows before his technician calls. The work order is already logged. It’s already prioritized. Someone is already on it.

That’s not a feature demo. That’s just an average Tuesday at Goodfellow, a Canadian lumber manufacturer that oversees hundreds of assets across multiple facilities and relies on Coast to hold all of it together.

Multi-site maintenance teams don’t need to choose between capability and usability. They need a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) that delivers enterprise-grade visibility, scales with their operation and earns adoption from the technician on the floor to the director in the office. And they need it without requiring a six-month implementation or an IT project manager to configure a work order form. Coast is that system, and here’s how it works.

The Multi-Site Visibility Gap Is a Solvable Problem

The biggest risk in multi-location maintenance isn’t broken equipment. It’s not knowing about it. When your team manages facility maintenance across two, five or 20 locations, the cracks show up in predictable ways. Someone reports a maintenance issue over text at Location 3, and nobody logs it. Preventive maintenance (PM) runs on schedule at your flagship site but reactively everywhere else. A maintenance manager calls around for status updates instead of seeing them. By the time a problem surfaces at the operations level, it’s already costing money.

Before Coast, Goodfellow ran exactly this kind of system — or tried to. Technicians walked plant floors, inspected tanks (pictured here), checked valves and logged preventive maintenance tasks every day. But all of it lived in binders. Handwritten. Siloed. Impossible to verify across locations or present with confidence to an auditor.

The maintenance was getting done. Proving it — and seeing it across all three plants in real time — was the problem.

That gap is solvable. But solving it requires more than digitizing a binder. It requires a system that centralizes visibility, standardizes processes and actually gets used by the people doing the work.

Enterprise Features Without the Enterprise Onboarding Timeline

Coast is not a lightweight tool built for small teams and capped there. It supports asset hierarchies, multi-site dashboards, advanced analytics, role-based access controls and cross-location reporting. These are enterprise-grade capabilities — the same ones organizations with thousands of employees require.

What’s different is how fast you get to them. Many enterprise asset management (EAM) platforms and enterprise CMMS tools front-load the complexity. Implementations stretch across quarters. Configuration requires consultants. Field technicians — the people who need the system most — resist adoption because the interface wasn’t built for someone checking assets on a plant floor. The investment is real. The time-to-value is long. And if adoption fails, the whole thing falls apart.

G2 users ranked Coast as the fastest CMMS platform to implement and the easiest to use. That’s not a trade-off for power — it’s the product working as designed. A team of 15 can be fully operational in days. A team of 15,000 can roll out location by location without dedicated IT support. The same platform serves both.

Grenier implemented Coast across all three Goodfellow facilities largely on his own. He built out the asset library, sent it to Coast’s team, and we handled the initial data load. Then came the physical rollout — QR codes on every asset, workflows built to match how each plant actually operated. “We’ve built out Coast with that information,” Grenier says. “It’s our plan followed through in Coast.”

That’s what fast implementation looks like at scale: You shape the system to your operation, not the other way around.

One Dashboard for Every Site

Work order management across multiple locations falls apart when managers can’t see across locations in one view. Coast’s multi-site dashboard gives operations leads real-time updates of every open work order, overdue PM, unassigned task and flagged issue — filtered by site, technician, asset type or priority. No more toggling between systems or spreadsheet reconciliation at the end of the week.

For Goodfellow, this changed the daily rhythm of the entire operation. Before Coast, communication about equipment issues ran through calls, texts and emails — easy to miss, impossible to track. Now, the team sees everything as it happens. “Every single day, [we see] everything that needs to be done; if we have a problem with a pump that’s leaking, we see it in Coast,” Grenier says.

The result was a shift from reactive maintenance to planned execution. Work orders get prioritized based on data. Technicians know what’s next without being told. And managers can plan instead of firefight — across all three plants, from one screen.

For large organizations, this kind of cross-site visibility also feeds directly into reporting and analytics. Which locations generate the most corrective work orders? Which asset classes have the highest failure rates? Where are PM completion rates lowest? Coast surfaces that data at the operational level, so decisions get made on evidence, not instinct.

QR Codes That Put Asset History at Your Fingertips

One of the most practical multi-site features Coast offers doesn’t require a dashboard at all. It requires a phone and a QR code.

Every asset in Coast can be tagged with a QR code. When a technician scans it, they immediately pull up that asset’s full maintenance history, open work orders, PM schedules and attached documentation — right from their mobile device. 

This matters at scale. Goodfellow tagged 906 assets across its three facilities — 416 in Montreal/Delson, 340 in Nova Scotia and 150 in Newfoundland. Every pump, valve, tank and piece of manufacturing equipment has a scannable history attached to it. A technician in Newfoundland and a technician in Montreal follow the same process to access the same quality of information.

QR-based workflows also accelerate onboarding. New technicians, seasonal staff and contractors don’t need to memorize asset IDs or navigate complex menus. They scan, they see, they act. That simplicity drives adoption — and in multi-site environments where staff turnover and site-to-site variation are constant, fast adoption isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s what keeps your preventive maintenance schedule from collapsing the moment someone new walks in.

Parts Transfer Across Locations Without the Guesswork

Multi-site parts management is one of the most overlooked cost drivers in facility and building maintenance operations. The scenario plays out constantly: A repair stalls at Location A because a specific filter is out of stock. Meanwhile, three of the same filter sit unused in a storage room at Location C. No one knows. The team orders new stock. The repair waits. Downtime extends.

Coast tracks parts inventory by location and makes it visible across sites. A maintenance manager can see what’s stocked at every location, identify where surplus exists and initiate transfers between sites before placing an external order. When a part moves, the system records it — so inventory levels stay accurate and auditable without manual reconciliation.

For organizations managing dozens of sites and hundreds of SKUs, this visibility directly reduces carrying costs and order frequency. It also eliminates the reactive scramble that happens when a critical part goes missing mid-repair. The team knows what they have, where it is and how to get it where it’s needed.

Consistent Processes Across Every Location

Inconsistency between sites is the quiet failure mode of multi-location maintenance programs. One site runs PMs on a strict schedule. Another runs them when someone remembers. A third uses a different inspection checklist because a former manager built it years ago, and no one replaced it. The result isn’t just inefficiency — it’s an asset inventory management problem, a compliance risk and a documentation gap that shows up painfully when auditors arrive.

Coast lets teams build standardized standard operating procedures (SOPs), inspection checklists and work order templates that you can deploy across every location. Site-level customization is still available where operations require it — but the baseline is consistent everywhere. When Goodfellow needed to satisfy audit requirements, timestamps, completion records and asset histories were all centralized and verifiable in Coast. The McCluskey Group, a 700-employee Tim Hortons franchisee operating 33 restaurant locations across Ottawa, Canada, had similar issues before Coast. Equipment downtime was communicated through calls and texts. There was no structured way to track what equipment (pictured above) needed fixing, how long it had been down or who was responsible for fixing it. When they moved to Coast, the system adapted to how their operation worked — not the other way around.

Today, 50 to 70 percent of their employees use Coast in some capacity. From the company president to 15-year-old team members, everyone communicates through the same platform. “It truly simplifies our lives,” says Tara Lee-Hendrycks, director of operations for The McCluskey Group. “And now that we’ve had it for so long, we take it for granted. We do everything in it.”

That level of adoption — across an organization that spans dozens of locations — happens because the system is flexible enough to meet each site’s reality and simple enough that everyone from leadership to part-time staff can use it.

The ROI Case Across Any Scale

Coast isn’t positioned as a budget alternative. It’s positioned as a high-return investment — one that delivers measurable results faster and more consistently than alternatives, regardless of how large your organization is.

According to G2 user reviews, Coast ranks among the highest-rated CMMS platforms for estimated return on investment (ROI). The data from Coast customers bears that out.

Goodfellow reduced equipment downtime by 25 to 30 percent after deploying Coast. The mechanism was simple: faster issue reporting, faster response. “Our downtime was cut by 25 to 30 percent just because of being able to report and see [an issue] more quickly,” Grenier says. 

The McCluskey Group saw an even more direct financial impact. By closing gaps in work order tracking, they cut maintenance expenses by 50 percent in their first year. Equipment that used to sit down for two days was up and running again within hours. “Less downtime means more opportunity for driving sales,” Lee-Hendrycks adds.

These results aren’t coincidental. They’re what happens when an organization has full visibility, standardized processes and a system people actually use. The CMMS ROI compounds as the platform scales — more sites, more assets, more data flowing into decisions that reduce waste and extend equipment life.

Built to Scale From 3 Sites to 300

Coast’s architecture was built for organizations that grow. Role-based access controls mean a regional director sees cross-site analytics while a site technician sees only their location’s queue. Asset hierarchies organize equipment by site, system and sub-component — the same structure a large enterprise requires to manage assets across a distributed portfolio. Advanced reporting surfaces performance trends at the location level and the enterprise level simultaneously.

And because Coast ranks among the highest-rated CMMS platforms for ease of use per G2 reviews, scaling doesn’t require retraining your entire workforce every time a new site comes online. The same intuitive interface that a 15-person team navigates on day one works for the 500th employee at the 40th location. New sites inherit the same workflows, checklists and asset templates already built. Rollout is measured in days, not quarters.

That flexibility — combined with the speed of implementation and the depth of enterprise capability — is what makes Coast a fit for organizations at every stage. The best maintenance management software that works for where you are now should also work for where you’re going. Coast is designed to do both.

See Every Site. Control Every Outcome.

Multi-site maintenance management doesn’t require a six-month implementation, a dedicated IT team or a platform built for complexity first and usability second. It requires a system that gives your team enterprise-grade visibility, enforces consistent processes across locations and earns adoption at every level of the organization — from the plant floor to the operations dashboard.

Coast does all of that. Goodfellow proved it across three plants and 906 assets. The McCluskey Group proved it across dozens of restaurant locations with 700 employees. Both organizations got results in months, not years.

Ready to bring every site under one system? Coast makes it easy to manage work orders, track assets and standardize processes across all your locations — without a long onboarding timeline or enterprise-level friction. Sign up for a free Coast account, and see how fast your team can get full multi-site visibility starting today.