Dr. Sasse Austria uses ToolSense to move from reactive, after-the-fact machine management to proactive, data-driven maintenance, with one vendor-agnostic platform that knows where every cleaning machine is, when it was serviced, and when it should be replaced.
The Dr. Sasse Group has been in facility management for 45 years, founded in Munich by its eponymous founder, who started cleaning to finance his studies and grew the business into an international operation, including more than 30 years in Austria. Michael Lackner runs Dr. Sasse Austria as CEO and joined the roughly 7,000-strong company within the past year.
The starting point
Before ToolSense, Dr. Sasse Austria at least knew which machine sat in which customer object, and could reconstruct service history from the maintenance invoices it received regularly, but always in hindsight. There was no live view: the company learned when a machine had been serviced only after the fact, which left no room to plan ahead.
Michael came across ToolSense via LinkedIn, intrigued by a startup whose maintenance and response times had pulled ahead of competitors, and the relationship has run since.
Why ToolSense
A central reason was vendor independence. Dr. Sasse selects machines specifically for each customer's needs, so it does not standardise on a single manufacturer across Austria, and a manufacturer's own tool would only ever cover part of the fleet. ToolSense bridges that, because its cleaning-machine suppliers are already integrated, new machines arrive ready to connect.
We deliberately don't have one machine manufacturer that we use across all of Austria, and what ToolSense does is bridge that, because all our cleaning-machine suppliers are already integrated.
Michael Lackner · CEO at Dr. Sasse Austria, Dr. Sasse Austria
That cross-manufacturer reach comes partly from ToolSense's own IoT hardware, which captures runtime and usage signals regardless of the machine brand, and partly from a growing roster of integrated manufacturer partners.
Operational impact
With service data now centralised in one asset management system, Dr. Sasse can act proactively rather than waiting for the next invoice. The QR codes on each machine open a direct line, both to manufacturers and internally, and the platform shows in advance which machine is in use and when one is nearing the end of its useful life. ToolSense even flags when repair costs have climbed high enough that replacing a machine makes more sense.
The same data answers a sharper commercial question: whether the machines in daily use are deployed optimally, and where a smaller, cheaper machine, or none at all, would do the job just as well and cut cost.
What's next
Lackner sees big potential across most of the industry but warns that a flood of different providers and systems makes interoperability the real bottleneck, because digitalisation only pays off when manual data entry shrinks and master data flows between systems rather than being re-keyed. He is already thinking about connecting ToolSense with adjacent systems, the kind of integration ToolSense sees as the next step toward automating processes end to end. On sustainability, Dr. Sasse wants to use the same data to raise awareness and work with customers as partners on tailored, resource-conscious concepts, convinced there will be no way around digitalisation in the decade ahead.
