Menard UK 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.
Menard UK installs ground-improvement foundations for buildings. The business runs roughly 80 staff across the UK, about ten of them in the yard, and around 30 major machines moving between sites at any one time. Paul Johnson runs that yard, maintenance and repairs on every piece of equipment before it ships to the next job.
From Menard Germany’s shortlist to a yard-wide rollout
The Menard Group operates globally, and the team had been actively searching for a CMMS. ToolSense surfaced on the shortlist after a recommendation from the German Menard office. Several vendors made it to demos; only one fit.
“Some platforms, Point of Rental was one, just felt too in-depth for what we needed,” Paul says. “The ToolSense platform looked really sleek. It was easy to use, not very complicated. I could see my staff picking it up quite easily. I could also visualise how everything I was shown in the demo would actually work for our company, and where we could bend our processes to fit what was already there.”
Before ToolSense: a two-week paperwork lag
Pre-ToolSense, every daily inspection on site was filled out on paper. The slip travelled from the operator to the office on a weekly post, then onward to the plant yard.
“It could sometimes be two weeks before we saw even a small fault that had been reported on a daily inspection,” Paul says. Phone calls multiplied to fill the gap. Looking for parts meant searching the right Excel file in a directory of half a dozen.
Audit season was its own annual ordeal. The yard ran on handwritten notes and spreadsheets. “When audit came around each year, it took two to three weeks of everybody in the yard counting everything.”
It could sometimes be two weeks before we saw even a small fault that had been reported.
Paul Johnson · Yard Manager, Menard UK
What changed on day one
ToolSense moved the entire daily-inspection flow off paper. Operators scan a QR code on the machine, the fault opens as a ticket the moment they submit it, and the workshop sees it immediately, not in a fortnight.
“The guys on site have picked up the QR-code scanning really, really well,” Paul says. “That logs the ticket with us immediately, which is a massive improvement on two weeks of waiting for paperwork.”
The parts-inventory module replaced the spreadsheets that used to swallow the yard for two to three weeks every audit season. Stock counts are continuous now; the annual scramble is gone.
One to two hours back, every day, per user
Asked to quantify the saving, Paul puts the number at one to two hours a day, per user.
“The paperwork was a massive delay. It caused a lot of extra phone calls that weren’t needed. Searching for things is so much easier, not having five different Excel files for one purpose. At least an hour a day for me, probably more for the rest of the company.”
Recording faults at the source is also lifting morale on site. “Things are getting dealt with quicker, so the operators are much happier as well.”
What’s next: AI for predictive maintenance
Paul sees AI as the next step, not as a replacement for his team but as a layer on top. “I don’t see it taking over people or anything like that, but I do see it for the analysis of things. I’ve noticed on a few pieces of newer equipment that manufacturers are using sensors to pre-empt failures, they flag the issue before it actually breaks down. I think that’s going to be a big thing in the next few years.”
For the yard itself, the immediate vision is tighter: streamline the loop from operator inspection to a closed ticket so every job gets dealt with as fast as possible. Beyond that, Paul is watching ToolSense’s IoT hardware roadmap, where machine sensors feed faults into the same workflow without anyone having to log them by hand.
From spreadsheets to a single source of truth
Alexander Manafi, ToolSense CEO and co-founder, frames the through-line:
“That’s what we do, go away from Excel, pen and paper, WhatsApp, into one proper centralised system. Maintenance, inspections, parts, IoT, everything in one app, on one glance. And then combining all of that with IoT, so it’s not just digitised but also automated. That’s the goal.”
Menard UK sits inside the construction operations playbook ToolSense has built with leading civils and groundworks groups, a single platform for yard, workshop, dispatch and site, designed for the way the work actually runs.
