When Software Aligns With Real-World Workflows, Facilities Leaders Boost Adoption and Customers Win

Whether facilities management technology succeeds or fails ultimately boils down to people. Software can promise efficiency and visibility, but results depend on whether store teams, vendors, and internal staff actually change how they work. Many organizations still treat a new platform as a straightforward technical rollout rather than the behavioral shift it really requires. When polished workflows collide with the unpredictable reality of daily operations, small frictions build up and stall adoption long before any return on investment appears.

The solution begins with reframing the problem. As Chief Customer Officer at Fexa, Maranda Dziekonski has spent her career helping companies close the gap between technology and the people expected to use it. With more than 20 years of experience and a track record of guiding companies through five exits, she is widely recognized as a Top 100 Customer Success Strategist and a Top 25 Customer Success Influencer. Dziekonski believes adoption is rarely a technical issue, arguing that it comes down to whether the system fits the real workflows of the people relying on it every day.

“Adoption isn’t about logins. It’s about whether the right people are completing the intended workflows and actually getting the work done through the system," says Dziekonski. The friction that stalls a CMMS implementation usually comes from familiar problems that organizations underestimate. According to Dziekonski, the sticking points are “almost always human and workflow-related, not technical,” including unclear goals, misaligned expectations, limited training, and teams that simply do not have the bandwidth to absorb another system.

• In the wild: Her response is not another layer of software but a different kind of partnership grounded in understanding how work actually happens. That perspective comes from seeing the platform used in real environments, where the realities of store operations rarely match a workflow diagram. “Going on-site to see the platform used in the wild is key to understanding what our non-technical users are going through. You cannot just stand up a tech tool and tell people to go do the work," Dziekonski explains. "People in stores are walking around with iPads while customers approach them, and the system has to account for those distractions."

• Link up: True adoption requires partnership, not supervision, because lasting change only happens when both sides move forward together. “Instead of handholding, I prefer to call it linking arms. When you hold hands, you're bringing someone along. When you link arms, you're coming along together."

In practice, "linking arms" means building a shared system that gives every stakeholder visibility into the work. For major partners like Tractor Supply, that alignment creates a clearer operational picture across stores, vendors, and facilities teams. The company’s large-scale rollout will be explored further in the upcoming webinar Switching At Scale: How Tractor Supply Switched CMMS Across 2,400+ Locations. In other cases, the impact shows up in harder numbers, where stronger adoption translates directly into measurable efficiency gains and cost savings.

• From calls to clicks: In one retail rollout, stores routinely called a high-cost call center to submit maintenance requests until targeted training pushed teams toward the platform itself. “The stores found the new process easy and intuitive, so the calls dropped and the savings followed,” Dziekonski recalls. In another case, a Fortune 500 specialty retailer adopted a more structured rollout with phased implementation, on site support during the pilot, and collaborative planning. “After launch, they reached 100 percent adoption with store managers and saw a 20 percent increase in operational efficiency.”

• Pulse check: Getting there requires a scorecard that looks beyond surface activity and focuses on whether the system is actually driving the intended work. Adoption is measured across the entire ecosystem, from store teams to facility managers to vendors, with success defined by participation from the right roles and progress toward the customer’s own goals. “We're not just looking at logins or total activity. We measure whether the right personas are participating, including stores, facility managers, and vendors,” Dziekonski says. “We also monitor signals like ticket volume, CSAT, and a Pulse Health score that tracks the overall sentiment of the partnership to make sure customers are achieving value in the way they define it.”

• From A to Z: Those operational gains often unlock a larger goal for facilities leaders: shifting from reactive maintenance to a more proactive, data-driven model. Reducing friction in everyday workflows improves efficiency and frees up resources that can be reinvested in preventative work. “When you resolve reactive issues faster, you see fewer handoffs, fewer repeat visits, and less wasted spend, which improves store uptime and frees up budget for preventative maintenance,” Dziekonski says. “On paper, a facilities request looks simple, like A, then B, then C, but in reality the rest of the alphabet shows up too, and it becomes far more complicated than a workflow diagram suggests.”

The human-centered lens is becoming more important as the facilities industry enters its next phase. Artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape how maintenance data, vendor coordination, and predictive planning work across large portfolios, but the technology still requires experienced guidance to deploy effectively. At the same time, facilities teams face constant pressure to deliver more results with fewer resources. Tools like FexaAI are emerging to help organizations navigate predictive agents and automation, yet the underlying challenge remains the same: technology only delivers value when the people using it can integrate it into the realities of their daily work.

For executives weighing their next platform decision, Dziekonski believes the conversation has to extend beyond the software itself. “There will always be an upfront investment to switch any platform. But when you think about your goals for the next one to three years, especially if they involve reducing spend or increasing efficiency, you have to think about change holistically,” she says. “Don't just look at the tech stack. The technology matters, but the partnership matters just as much, because the right partner helps you achieve those KPIs.”