Why Leading Retailers Are Making the Switch to Fexa CMMS

Facilities managers don’t have time to spare, and that’s a problem. 

Too much of the time, they’re stuck in a reactive loop — putting out fires, tracking down work order details, and managing vendors. Meanwhile, they’re trying to juggle expansion projects, rethink store formats, and deal with rising costs, inflation, and a shrinking workforce. 

Handling this workload leaves no time for facilities professionals to manage the strategic tasks that will help their organizations thrive. For FMs who are ready to take back their time and find new ways of running their facilities, finding the right technology solutions is essential. Ultimately, legacy CMMS platforms are rarely up for the task–but innovative, flexible CMMS platforms like Fexa are changing the game. 

Legacy Systems Weren’t Built for This World

The CMMS platforms that many facilities teams are using were built 25 or 30 years ago. Like other defunct technologies that have lost their usefulness,  legacy CMMS companies were designed for a different era — one that came before the internet went mainstream, before cloud computing, before mobile transformed how we work, and definitely before AI. 

These systems were built around rigid, manual, form-based workflows that don’t match how teams actually operate. But technology has moved on, and these platforms can’t adapt to what AI can do now.

What is the Biggest Challenge Facilities Teams Face Today?

The biggest challenge facilities teams face is that they don’t have enough time to focus on the strategic work their brands need. They’re bogged down in day-to-day problems, constantly reacting just to keep operations running. 

Then there’s the administrative burden: 

• Gathering information from the field in real time
• Tracking down missing work order details
• Dealing with technicians who show up without the right parts because the information wasn’t captured correctly
• Addressing redundant work orders that never needed to be routed in the first place 

All of this eats up time that could be spent on bigger problems, especially those that require real critical thinking and creative problem-solving.

Additional challenges include the growing gap in skilled trades, rising equipment and supplies costs, inflation, and tariffs.  Not to mention, retail stores themselves are changing. Today’s leading retailers are becoming media assets for brands, often functioning as showrooms or distribution centers in new omnichannel models. 

All of this means that the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been.

What Does It Mean To Have a CMMS that is Built for the AI Era? 

Fexa CEO Kurt Smith describes his approach as pattern-matching — looking at where AI is working in other industries and figuring out where that technology can solve the specific problems facilities teams are dealing with. The company talks to customers, learns about their challenges, and builds solutions around what actually matters.

Fexa understands that forms are dead. Instead, the company has replaced them with conversational, chat-based experiences. A great example is the AI-powered Work Order Agent, which helps store managers and on-site team members create work orders faster. It also captures better data and prevents unnecessary costs by catching duplicate requests or identifying issues that can be resolved without a truck roll. 

The AI gathers more information upfront through conversational, easy-to-understand questions, which means that technicians can show up with the right parts the first time. 

But work orders are just the beginning. Fexa is building toward what Smith calls a holistic facility agent — one that can look across multiple data streams like building management systems, historical maintenance records, and asset-level information to surface insights across entire portfolios. 

Fexa’s goal with AI is to give facilities teams an interface where they can ask strategic questions about how to improve performance and brand impact, not just react to individual problems. 

Smith believes the productivity and efficiency of the facility management industry will increase tenfold over the next five years. AI takes the busywork off their plates, automates redundant tasks, and frees up time so facilities teams can think about not just next week, but next quarter and beyond. 

The Team Behind Fexa

Kurt is clear about what drives Fexa’s work: the team. He describes “Fexans” as the most talented, hardest-working, ambitious group in the industry. Specifically, Fexans are motivated to serve customers, as they believe in Fexa’s purpose: to nurture the built environment and elevate the human experience. 

There’s a belief in software that the most important asset in a business isn’t the intellectual property or even the brand. It’s the people. 

How Can Your CMMS Help You Join the AI Era? 

AI isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. It’s a fundamental paradigm shift that is just as significant as the move from personal computers to the internet, or from cloud to mobile. We’re in a new era now, and the tools built for yesterday’s world can’t get you ahead. 

Smith is direct: if you believe we’re entering a new era, and the evidence is clear that we are, then you need a platform and a partner built for today. Smart operators understand that technology has to be central to their strategy. 

The key to building a successful business is delivering more value than your competitors. That’s what Fexa plans to do every single day. In five years, Kurt believes the majority of the world’s retailers will be operating on Fexa — not because of marketing or hype, but because the results will show it. 

In other words, all roads lead to Fexa. That’s not a statement rooted in overconfidence, but a projection based on what the company delivers to its customers. Tired of spending your days putting out fires instead of solving real problems? Schedule a demo to see how Fexa frees up your time for the work that actually matters.