Al-Musbah Group 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.
Al-Musbah Group is a large family-owned conglomerate in Saudi Arabia spanning parking, hotels, shopfitting, supermarkets and food and beverage. John Gee is COO of Modern Foods, the F&B division, running ~50 operating units and ~450 staff. The portfolio includes franchised brands like Sbarro and Smashburger, and the in-house hero Brew 92, a coffee-shop concept with 11 units open and another six in build.
From “somebody has to phone somebody” to a real estate view
How did Modern Foods handle asset management before? “The short answer is we didn’t.” The longer answer: an Oracle legacy stack from twenty years ago, plus the inevitable Excel spreadsheet maintained by one person. Each time an under-counter chiller moved between locations, someone made a phone call, someone updated Excel, someone shared it onward. Maintenance costs were impossible to track, was that espresso machine repaired three times, or six?
Smashburger’s US operation had been demoing a similar asset platform to franchisees. When John asked whether Modern Foods could use it in Saudi Arabia, the answer was no. He started searching online, and ToolSense answered the questions he actually had.
Visibility, then better capex decisions
A thousand assets are live on ToolSense already, with two to three thousand more tagged in the next six weeks. The first concrete win is operational visibility, John can look at any restaurant and see what equipment is there. The second is capex discipline. A reopened airport store recently surfaced seven damaged TVs. With history of purchase and repair attached to each asset, the buy-or-fix call becomes a data question rather than a guess.
A piece of equipment moves from one location to another, on Excel, somebody has to phone, log in, change it, share it. That doesn’t work. With ToolSense, the asset goes with the data.
John Gee · Chief Operations Officer, Modern Foods (Al-Musbah Group)
Why a younger platform won the contract
John’s call on ToolSense was a deliberate one: a young, fast-moving platform team without thirty years of legacy assumptions baked in, supported by a customer-success function that has been hands-on through implementation. For a business opening new stores constantly, asset history baked into a serial number and a delivery note, and a vendor that keeps moving, was the right combination.
