Coast Tailors CMMS Software to Meet Redeemer’s Fellowship Maintenance Needs

Redeemer’s Fellowship is a non-denominational Evangelical church with about 1,200 parishioners from the Roseburg, Ore., community — about 5 percent of the town’s population. Yes, the church has your typical Sunday services, but it hosts several community events and bible studies throughout the week as well. That means the church’s three large buildings — an office building, worship center and ministry center — are often occupied at any given hour, any day of the week.

With all that activity, the buildings are bound to require various types of maintenance — and often.

Getting by With Sunday Morning Conversations

Before starting with Coast, Redeemer’s Fellowship had an outdated maintenance strategy in place, says Steven Grace, the executive pastor who’s been with the church for almost two years, running its operations. “It often relied on one person’s memory and volunteers who did the best they could,” Grace says. “A lot of things were falling through the cracks because maintenance requests were made via email and impromptu conversations.”

While the church actually did have a software in place, it wasn’t well-used or well-tracked, so it was no one’s go-to when reporting if something was broken or needed to be fixed.

Coming from a technical background, working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California, Grace knew that the church needed a better way to wrangle all the maintenance requests.

“It had to be simple and straightforward for people to use,” Grace says. “There’s a lot Coast can do but a lot we don’t need it to do.”

Coast’s Affordability and Ease of Use Won the Church Over

According to Grace, Coast was incredibly economical; the price point was good, but most importantly, it needed to be accessible for him and the 17 employees and volunteers who regularly work at the church. 

Case in point: The use of QR codes to create external work orders makes it as easy as taking a picture of the QR code at a specific location (say, the bathroom in the office building) and then filling out a quick form to describe the issue that needs to be addressed. From there, the maintenance request is sent to Grace to assign it. “It takes a lot of pressure off them, and then the ball’s in my court,” he says.

While affordability and ease of use stood out when Grace decided to sign with Coast, the company’s follow up and customer support were also worth noting. Maintenance Care was the other software he was considering, but they waited at least six weeks to follow up with him; whereas, Coast checked in with him right away. 

That same customer service was also evident during the implementation process. Setting up Coast was as easy as handing over the Excel sheet that Grace was previously working from and having the customer success team export it into the software.

“Coast’s customer service has been great,” Grace says. “I worked with Joyce, and she’s phenomenal and gets the job done.”

Tailoring Coast’s Software to the Church’s Needs

After already paying for a software of little use, Grace’s primary goal was to have a simple solution that was intuitive for everyone using it, but Coast took that need a step further.

“With Coast, I had the ability to tailor the software to how I was already tracking my maintenance,” he says. “I wasn’t beholden to the way the software was working.”

In Grace’s 30 years working in the technical field, he has seen organizations buy software and implement it in a way that changed their entire process. “[Coast’s team] was able to tailor the software to exactly what I needed it to do,” Grace adds. “That was important because it had to be usable.”

Getting Work Orders Completed Faster

Grace says he’s been using the software since January 2024, and the implementation really only affected two people — him and his facility maintenance coordinator, Tony Heinrichsen. He describes this as a plus “because the other staff don’t even have to think about it.”

“If a door’s broken, they pull up the QR code and submit a request,” he adds. “That means people who report needs don’t have to learn a new software and are more likely to become aware of needs around our facilities.”

In the about seven months since using Coast, the maintenance team has successfully tracked and completed more than 200 work orders and now tracks about 40 vendors, including contractors for plumbing and cement work, to name a few. 

Tony especially benefits from Coast since it’s his go-to place for daily tasks. As soon as a work request comes in, it goes into pending review, and then Grace can assign it a priority level before handing it off to Tony. Then, the two can track and update maintenance requests and close them out all from the app. Because Coast has helped optimize the maintenance process, Grace says the team is tracking and getting work requests done much quicker than before.

For those considering a CMMS software like Coast, Grace advises that “you understand your maintenance needs before you engage the software; don’t expect the software to solve your problems. It’s a great tool; it helps us, but it’s a tool that supports our process — not the other way around. And as far as affordability and customer support, we’ve been very happy with Coast.”