How Breck School Replaced 20 Years of Informal Campus FM with a Connected CMMS

About Breck School

Breck School is a PreK–12 independent school in Golden Valley, Minnesota, operating a single 500,000 sq ft campus. The facilities management team, led by Director of Facilities Mike Thorson, is responsible for the full lifecycle of campus operations — from day-to-day service requests and work order execution to preventive maintenance, safety compliance, vendor management, and event operations for major school activities.

As an independent school with a workforce spanning custodial staff and experienced building engineers, and an environment where operational continuity directly shapes the learning experience, Breck had no formal CMMS before Facilio — relying instead on institutional habit and informal communication to keep the campus running.

Challenges:

Breck School had no formal FM system when Mike Thorson's team began evaluating Facilio. Faculty and staff submitted requests by catching FM staff in the hallway, by email, or verbally — none of it tracked, prioritised, or visible as a shared operational record. Critical safety equipment, including more than 150 fire extinguishers across the campus, was maintained through paper tag sign-offs by a single technician walking a physical floor plan.

Equipment like boilers and kitchen refrigeration ran with no monitoring or automation. Budget and vendor spend was manually tracked in Excel, with 50 to 70 invoices coded and entered every week. Any new system would need to be genuinely usable by building engineers who had little to no prior experience with technology.

Key Challenges:

• No structured request system — FM requests made informally for 20+ years, with no tracking, history, or priority visibility across the team
• Inflexible legacy FM software requiring multi-step vendor escalation for even simple workflow changes, such as auto-assigning a work order to a team
• Paper-based inspection sign-offs for 150+ fire extinguishers with no digital audit trail or scheduled inspection management
• No building system automation — boilers, kitchen refrigeration, and the lighting management system operated in disconnected silos with no monitoring or alerts
• Shadow budget tracking in Excel with 50–70 invoices processed per week outside the FM system, with no integration between operations and vendor spend
• Building engineers with limited prior technology exposure required a system simple enough to earn genuine daily adoption

Facilio's Solution

Facilio's Connected CMMS became Breck School's first formal FM platform, replacing a fragmented combination of paper-based processes, verbal requests, and legacy tools with a single cloud-based system covering service requests, work orders, asset management, preventive maintenance, vendor management, compliance inspections, floor plan-based space visibility, and Energy Star integration.

The deployment was designed around Breck's specific workforce reality: field engineers and custodial staff with limited technology familiarity, a director managing the full operational picture, and a broad occupant base of teachers and administrators who needed a simple, low-friction way to report issues and track outcomes. Facilio's phased implementation approach allowed the team to go live with core modules before expanding into compliance, vendor management, and energy visibility.

Solution Highlights

1. Self-Serve Occupant Portal to Replace the Hallway System

Faculty, staff, and administrative assistants now log service requests directly through Facilio's occupant portal, replacing two decades of informal, verbal FM requests. The portal gives every occupant a structured, trackable channel for reporting issues — from broken classroom furniture to facilities concerns — with real-time updates on request status. The FM team transitioned from reactive, untracked interruptions to a managed queue, with every request logged, assigned, and visible from a single dashboard.

2. Structured Work Order and Assignment Workflows

Once a service request is received, the FM team converts it to a work order and distributes it to the appropriate technician or team. Facilio's low-code workflow engine enables automatic assignment rules, status transitions, and priority-based routing — changes the team can configure directly, without going through a vendor or support chain. Technicians access their assigned work orders through the mobile app with role-specific views that show only the tasks relevant to their day, reducing the friction that had previously made adoption difficult among a non-technical field workforce.

3. Digital Asset Register with QR-Based Scan-to-Request

Breck School built its first digital asset register in Facilio, with critical assets tagged with QR codes and registered in the platform. Technicians use the Facilio mobile app to scan an asset and pull up its full history, maintenance record, and associated work orders. For occupants and administrative staff, the same QR tag enables scan-to-request: scanning a tagged asset opens a pre-populated service request form, eliminating the incomplete, context-free reports that had previously made fault identification and resolution slow.

4. Compliance Inspection Management

Safety inspections for fire extinguishers, equipment checks, and campus audits — previously managed through paper sign-offs and manually walked floor plan routes — are now scheduled and tracked inside Facilio. Inspection schedules trigger work orders automatically, with each completed task recorded in the platform to build a structured, retrievable compliance audit trail. The transition removed dependence on a single technician's manual record and gave the FM team verifiable, digital documentation across every compliance category on campus.

5. Vendor Management and COI Tracking

Vendors are registered and managed in Facilio with certificate of insurance (COI) tracking and expiry automation. When a vendor's COI lapses, the platform flags it before work is allocated, preventing uninsured contractor exposure. Contract and vendor records are held centrally, replacing ad hoc email trails and manual follow-up. The FM team now has structured oversight of its supply chain with the accountability they previously had no formal mechanism to enforce.

6. Floor Plan-Based Space and Service Visibility

Breck School's campus floor plans are uploaded into Facilio with zones mapped and assets tagged to specific locations. Service requests are associated with spatial context, and the FM team can monitor open work orders visually across the campus layout. For a 500,000 sq ft campus where locating a specific room, piece of equipment, or reported fault had previously required back-and-forth communication, spatial context transformed how requests were logged, assigned, and resolved.

Impact

• Faculty and staff service requests now captured digitally through a self-serve portal, ending a 20-year culture of hallway-based, untracked FM requests
• Work orders assigned, tracked, and resolved within a single system, giving the Director of Facilities complete operational visibility without manual follow-up or email chase
• 150+ fire extinguishers and critical safety equipment brought under a structured digital inspection schedule, replacing paper-based manual sign-offs with a full compliance audit trail
• QR-based scan-to-request enables occupants to log location-specific service requests directly from any tagged asset, eliminating incomplete, asset-unlinked fault reports
• Vendor COI tracking and contract management centralised in Facilio, removing the risk of uninsured contractor work and replacing manual compliance follow-up
• Building engineers with no prior technology experience successfully onboarded to Facilio's mobile app, with role-specific views tailored to reduce complexity and drive genuine field adoption