Maintenance operations where every failure, spare part and repair has an owner until the equipment is back in service

Mi Retail is an operations center that manages the human work around your maintenance systems. The CMMS or EAM keeps the asset register, work orders, preventive plans and history; Mi Retail handles what happens when that work depends on people outside the maintenance crew — a part the storeroom must find, a stop production must approve, a request from a building occupant, a repair a manager must authorize. Each of those situations becomes an Operational Work Item with an owner, a state, a due date and evidence, and it travels between maintenance, storeroom, production and facilities until the asset is back in service. Everyone sees what is blocked and why, without asking on the radio.

No. Your CMMS or EAM stays the system of record for assets, work orders, preventive schedules, parts history and costs, and Mi Retail never keeps a second copy. A work order is the maintenance record, with its own fields, codes and statuses. A work item is the operational envelope around it: who must act now, what it waits for, when it must escalate and which evidence closes it. The work order can say “waiting for materials”; Mi Retail shows that the storeroom owns that wait, when the part is expected and who is affected. Keep your CMMS; Mi Retail takes over where the work leaves it.

When a maintenance plan comes due — by calendar or by meter — the planner releases it as a work item with the plan’s checklist. The technician inspects the equipment and, if they find a failure, records it with the reading and a photo. From there, child work items go to whoever holds each missing piece: the storeroom sources the part, production approves the downtime window, and the repair waits blocked with its reason until both are in place. After the repair, the planner reviews the test run and the new meter reading, and the work closes with that evidence. The CMMS keeps the asset history; Mi Retail keeps the people moving.

The repair is marked blocked with an explicit reason, such as “waiting for bearing kit”, and linked to the storeroom’s part request. That changes who can see the problem: the planner sees it in the preventive backlog, the storeroom sees that its request is holding a critical asset, production sees why the machine is not ready, and managers see it in Team Operations among everything else that is blocked. When the part arrives and the request closes, the technician is notified and the repair returns to ready. Nobody has to ask whether the part came in, and a repair that stays blocked too long escalates instead of being forgotten.

People outside maintenance do not need to learn the CMMS. An operator who hears a strange noise, an office manager with a broken air conditioner or a supervisor who needs a machine adjusted submits a request and follows it from My Requests, where they see its state, who has it and when it is expected. Maintenance triages the request, turns it into a work order in the CMMS when it needs one and keeps the requester informed without phone calls. If a request is rejected or merged with an existing one, the requester sees the reason. This is how the maintenance team stops being interrupted on the radio for status updates.

Yes, when they have their own organization on Mi Retail. A specialized repair, a calibration or a warranty visit can be sent as a derived work item that lands in the provider’s own intake queue; they assign it inside their team, and you follow its state, visit date and evidence without seeing their internal work. When they close it with their service report, your repair can continue. Many maintenance operations are fully internal, like the compressor example on this page, but the same model extends to contractors when part of the work leaves the building, so the exchange stops depending on emails and phone calls nobody can trace.

Meters and inspections live in your CMMS or in the StoneOS Meters and Inspections apps. They decide when something needs attention: an hour meter that crosses a service threshold, a temperature out of range, an inspection point that fails. When that happens, the app publishes a work item into Mi Retail with its context — the asset, the reading, the checklist — assigned to the right team. Mi Retail does not interpret the readings; it makes sure a person owns the resulting work and closes it with evidence. At the end, a new reading or a passed inspection is often the proof that the asset is back to normal.

Each role has its own surface over the same work. A technician starts from Today and My Work, with inspections and repairs ordered by priority and due time, and sees immediately which ones are blocked and why. A planner uses Team Operations to see the preventive backlog, what is waiting on parts or downtime and who is overloaded, and reassigns in seconds. Operational Portfolio shows how each plant, building or fleet is doing: overdue preventive work, blocked repairs by age, assets with repeated failures. Executive Operations surfaces only what needs a decision at that level, such as a critical asset down for days or a replacement that exceeds the maintenance budget.

Every work item keeps who acted, when, under which approval and with which attachments. For a repair, that means the inspection reading and photo, the part request and its arrival, the downtime approval with its reason, the repair itself and the meter reading and test run that closed it, all linked to the same asset. The CMMS keeps the technical history; Mi Retail keeps the story of the decisions and handoffs around it. Control & Assurance lets an internal auditor or a safety reviewer inspect those trails and record findings without asking anyone for photos. Because the evidence is captured while the work happens, it is there when the asset fails again.

Yes, it is the same product at both ends. A single building with two technicians gets a simple Today view with what is due, what is waiting for a part and what occupants have asked for, without approval chains that do not exist. A company with many plants, buildings or vehicle fleets distributes the same work items across planners, technicians, storerooms, production and facilities managers, each with its own surface, and escalates exceptions to regional or executive levels. Each site can have its own workspace, and Operational Portfolio compares them side by side. What changes is how responsibilities are split, not how the work is represented.

The Assets suite of StoneOS brings apps for the domain work of maintenance and facilities: Asset Registry, Maintenance, Maintenance Plans, Meters, Inspections, Facilities, Fleet, Spare Parts, Asset Lifecycle and Device Management. They sit on top of the Business Core apps every team uses, such as Sheets, Drive, Docs, Chat and To-do. Those apps keep the depth of each domain. Mi Retail is where the work they generate meets the people who must act on it: a plan that comes due, an inspection that fails, a spare part below stock or a vehicle out of service lands as a work item in the right person’s queue. If you keep your current CMMS, it stays the record.

Start with the flow that costs the most follow-up: usually repairs on critical equipment that wait on parts or on downtime. Create a maintenance workspace, invite the planners, technicians, the storeroom and the production or facilities supervisors, and open the next blocked repairs as work items with their reasons instead of radio calls. Within a few weeks you will see where repairs wait, which assets fail repeatedly and which approvals are slow. Then bring preventive plans and occupant requests into the same place, connect the CMMS you already use and, if it fits, add the Assets suite apps from StoneOS. Mi Retail is free to start, so one plant or building can prove it first.