Facilities maintenance operations and coordination

The client has spent over two decades building a national facilities maintenance and construction business, matching customer work requests, from major retailers, restaurants, banks, healthcare systems, and educational institutions, with a vetted network of contractors. At the center of that business is a proprietary software platform, built in-house over many years, that handles planning, scheduling, execution, accounting, and verification across thousands of transactions a day.

For years, the company had struggled to justify the cost and management overhead of running its own in-house software development team. That challenge came to a head when pandemic-era turnover hit the department hard, costing them their sole IT manager along with other developers. Leadership moved an experienced Accounting Manager, Kristen, into a newly created Information Systems Manager role. She understood the business deeply but wasn’t a developer herself, and she and her team started asking whether the same model the company used with its own customers, matching the right partner to the job, could solve their internal software problem too.

They set out to find a partner who could take over software development, delivery, and maintenance outright. The search weighed cost, the caliber of talent available, accountability to deadlines, continuity through the transition, and whether it would feel like an actual partnership rather than a vendor swap. Losing tribal knowledge with every staff departure was a fear they’d already lived through once, and didn’t want to live through again.

The company selected Gavant to take over responsibility for the software function. “I was impressed at how Gavant addressed the opportunity to work with us, from asking great questions and developing an understanding of our environment, to the flexibility they brought by working with our existing staff developer to ensure a smooth transition,” Kristen said.

As the relationship continued, it became clear the aging system needed more than maintenance. Gavant rebuilt the core system from the ground up, delivering a modernized platform built for where the business was headed next rather than where it had been.

Almost immediately, Kristen saw faster turnaround on complex initiatives that had been stuck for months with the previous in-house team. “As an experienced manager given a new role, it was easy to manage Gavant,” she said. “They communicate well using business vernacular so we can make good decisions and be kept in the loop. They present options so I can provide good direction, and they get it done.”

The rebuilt system landed the same way. Two days after it went live, the company’s CEO wrote directly to the team: “I am very impressed with the product your team delivered. There was a part of me dreading yesterday morning. As the day unfolded and the buzz from my team members was positive, I found myself very thankful, and Gavant is due the credit.” What started as a way to offload a software function the company no longer wanted to run in-house became a partnership trusted with rebuilding the system at the center of the business.