JLL uses ToolSense to make asset operations more transparent, faster to document, and easier to manage. This customer story focuses on the operational change: cleaner asset data, quicker issue handling, and maintenance workflows that teams can follow in daily work.
JLL runs the integrated facility management for the Genentech biopharma account, four sites in South San Francisco plus other locations across the country. Aaron Leigh Nevatt is the EH&S Director on the account: hazardous-waste programs, equipment inspections, compliance, all of it. The technical scope is unusual, 33,800+ assets inspected every month across labs and production areas.
When SAP and spreadsheets ran out of road
JLL’s client mandate to run on SAP for work orders started to fall apart at this scale. Issuing 33,800+ work orders a month was “a pretty big burden, and it didn’t make a lot of sense.” A second tool that tried to feed SAP didn’t survive contact with the workflow either. The team fell back to spreadsheets, literally tracking inspections in Excel, then once a month uploading them into SAP to meet the client requirement.
Innovation was already part of the JLL playbook with this account, so the team scouted for a more efficient way to track inspections and demonstrate compliance, outside the SAP CMMS, but feeding the same audit trail.
QR codes, scanning, and a confidence layer for the client
QR code scanning solved two problems at once. For the operator, the workflow is now: walk the route, scan tags, submit, and at end of day, see anything missed. The clipboard is gone, and so is the “did I get everything?” doubt. For Genentech, the client can scan any asset themselves and immediately see the inspection history. No emails. No work orders for a basic question.
Compliance reporting now runs outside SAP, in a format the client prefers, while the SAP record stays compatible with the broader account.
Instead of carrying around a spreadsheet hoping you got everything, you just go around and scan QR codes. When you’re done for the day, you see what you missed.
Aaron Leigh Nevatt · EH&S Director, JLL
Loss control, mobile engineering, and the AI question
Next on the list: tagging and tracking high-value items that leave the site, plus visibility for JLL’s mobile engineering operation, finding kit when it’s needed instead of looking for it. Aaron also sees ToolSense as a tool that, deployed across enough JLL accounts, becomes strategic, common data on what’s being done, by whom, at what frequency, to drive real process improvement.
On the ten-year horizon: AI integrated into CMMS workflows, with standardised data sets the AI can actually act on. As Alexander Manafi puts it on the call: “Big tools like SAP are sometimes a bit too much. If we can have little speed boats around them and make life easier for people on site, that’s the value.”
