ABM, one of the largest facility services companies, is using ToolSense to pull thousands of motorized and non-motorized assets out of scattered spreadsheets and into one digital system, so its aviation teams can finally see what equipment they have, where it is, and how often it's used.
Michael Ostendorf has been in the aviation business since 1985 and joined ABM when it acquired his company in 2012. As Senior Vice President of Service Delivery for the aviation division, he leads work on technology, innovation, training, and safety. His teams operate at airports, managing everything from sweepers and trucks to the wheelchairs that move passengers across terminals.
The starting point
Before ToolSense, ABM's equipment lived in disconnected records. A leasing partner tracked book values and fuel usage, but not what equipment was actually in use on a given day. Pre-operation inspections (POIs) were done on paper every morning, then re-entered into a database, and equipment moves between stations were tracked in Excel documents per station. With an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 non-motorized assets worth a thousand dollars or more spread across the field, there was no single view. As Ostendorf put it, the goal was to move "from the 19th century to the 21st century." A vivid example: in large operations a single day can see around a thousand wheelchair usages, and crews used to walk the airport putting dots on chairs to count them.
Why ToolSense
ABM had been evaluating applications for both motorized and non-motorized equipment. Motorized assets are comparatively easy because they carry electronics; non-motorized equipment is the hard part, usually requiring costly RFID hardware. ToolSense checked the boxes for both, was simple to use, and could be deployed quickly using low-cost QR or barcode tagging rather than an IoT device on every item.
What I found with ToolSense is they checked all the boxes, non-motorized and motorized. Non-motorized is very difficult; this is a very simple system to use and I can deploy it very quickly.
Michael Ostendorf · Senior Vice President Service Delivery – Aviation, ABM
Operational impact
The first wins come from consolidation: combining separate sheets (the equipment list, book values, actual usage) onto one dashboard that holds both motorized and non-motorized assets. When someone needs a truck or a sweeper, the team can instantly check whether a machine is sitting unused in a "boneyard" and redeploy it, instead of guessing. Consistent inventories let them see each asset and how many times it was used in a month. Wheelchairs can be scanned by barcode or QR code and counted quickly, replacing the manual dot-marking. The aim is to stop going backwards: an Excel sheet is only as current as the last person who updated and shared it, and once assets are logged into one asset management system, there's no need to return to spreadsheets.
This kind of centralized maintenance and inventory view is exactly what large FM companies need to manage assets at scale.
What's next
Ostendorf expects the COVID years to accelerate digitalization across facility services, from autonomous equipment to broader IoT adoption. As RFID costs fall, he sees beacons, QR, and RFID picking up assets automatically on arrival, and motorized equipment getting smarter, for example refusing to start until its pre-operation inspection is done. The hurdle is frontline adoption, and his answer is to keep it easy: scanning a QR code is far quicker than writing on paper and re-keying it, so crews will do it. Over the next five to ten years he expects far more system-to-system communication via APIs.
