Contipark moved its cleaning-machine fleet off a static Excel list and onto ToolSense, gaining live operating-hours data, true location tracking and a foundation for its new shared cleaning service centre.
Contipark is the German market leader in parking, with around 570 facilities, parking garages, lots and underground car parks, across Germany and Austria, most of them equipped with cleaning machines. Natalie Kaufhold has been a project manager for four and a half years, leading digitalisation projects in facility management and helping build a dedicated shared service centre for cleaning.
The starting point
Parking is a particular cleaning environment: large floor areas spread across multiple levels, with ramps and steep gradients, and almost no site staffed 24/7. That makes getting the right utilisation out of each machine, and deploying staff productively, a constant concern.
Before ToolSense, the entire fleet was managed on a single Excel list, and that list only recorded purchases. From the moment a machine was bought, Contipark captured manufacturer, quantity, price, purchase date and location, but once a machine was moved or retired, the connection broke. Nothing about a machine's lifecycle was tracked. At that scale, the limits were obvious.
Why ToolSense
Looking to take cleaning forward the way it had with a CAFM system elsewhere, Contipark approached its cleaning-machine manufacturers and reviewed their fleet-management systems. Several OEMs pointed to ToolSense, and that is how the two came together. The decisive draw was a way to lift utilisation: an automatic, always-current view of operating hours via built-in trackers, surfacing which machines are underused and where, and finally solving the question of where machines actually end up.
The annoying problem of relocations, where at the end of the day you don't know where your cleaning machines have gone, is solved by the trackers, so we're always up to date.
Natalie Kaufhold · Project Manager in Facility Management, Contipark
Operational impact
ToolSense replaces purchase-only inventory with a live asset register that reflects the full lifecycle of each cleaning machine. Operating-hours data flows in automatically, so utilisation can actually be measured and improved, and relocations no longer mean lost machines. For Alexander Manafi, the interesting part is the scale: IoT modules rolled out across many machines and many manufacturers, giving Contipark a Europe-wide view from a phone.
What's next
The fleet is one half of the picture; the new shared cleaning service centre is the other. Contipark plans to grow into ToolSense features it isn't using yet, for example reporting a defect straight from a machine to the manufacturer, and permission structures that let area service managers approve and route repair requests from multiple staff. Kaufhold's advice to others starting out: identify the core need and define the goal first, talk to several providers, and run a proper data inventory before introducing any new system, so you don't digitise outdated data.
