When regional Colorado car wash chain Autowash began growing rapidly, adding 13 locations in less than two years between 2021 and 2022, its operations couldn’t keep up. The company was still relying on hand-written sticky notes, text messages, fragmented spreadsheets, and employees’ own memory.
Autowash changed payment systems, but Erin Dreeszen, cofounder and chief of staff at Autowash, told Fortune she knew they had to find a way to “up” everything. They started with maintenance, which is crucial to operations in the car wash world. Each bay involves upwards of 20 different pieces of equipment that work together, and if there’s an issue with any single part, the whole thing goes down.
“The worst thing that can happen is someone shows up and the car wash is down for maintenance,” Dreeszen told Fortune. And now, with 26 locations and 150 car wash bays across them, that’s a lot of potential for something to go wrong — as well as a lot of repeatable problems begging for a more streamlined approach.
Working with MaintainX, Autowash adopted an AI-powered maintenance system that ended up laying the groundwork for the company to reimagine its entire operations layer around data and AI. The results are tangible: repair times dropped 74% across locations; labor productivity jumped as AI enabled workers to better do their jobs; and institutional knowledge that was previously stuck in employees’ heads is now systematized and searchable.
