The Two Extremes (and the Gap in Between)
If you manage facilities for a living, you already know what I'm about to describe. You just might not have thought about it in these terms.
There are two ends of the FM technology spectrum, and both of them are terrible.
On one end, you've got spreadsheets and emails. Maybe a WhatsApp group. Probably a whiteboard in the facilities room that somebody erases every Friday. This is where most FM teams actually live, and they've made it work through sheer force of will and institutional knowledge.
On the other end, you've got what I like to call the Imaginary Workplace Management Systems. The behemoth monster legacy platforms that cost half a million dollars annually, take six months to implement, and require a three-day training course that nobody remembers by the following Monday. They've got 127 features and the average user touches maybe ten of them.
The gap in between those two extremes? That's where most FM teams actually need to be. And until recently, nobody was building for it.
Why Spreadsheets Work (Until They Don't)
I've walked into facility rooms in San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. Different cities, different companies, different industries. And I keep finding the same thing: a notebook, a whiteboard, a spreadsheet and too little time.
Here's the thing — those tools work. They're simple. Everyone can use them. The new technician doesn't need a training course to write on a whiteboard or update a spreadsheet. The night shift can read what the day shift left behind. When something breaks, someone writes it down and handles it.
The problem shows up slowly. It shows up when Sarah goes on vacation and she's the only one who knows the vendor history for the HVAC on floor seven. It shows up when you need maintenance records for an audit and you're spending 48 hours pulling information from six different places. It shows up when someone leaves the company and twenty years of knowledge walks out the door.
The spreadsheet works until it doesn't. And when it stops working, it stops working catastrophically.
Why the Behemoths Fail
So the obvious solution is a proper system, right? Something enterprise-grade. Something with real-time dashboards and predictive analytics and a digital twin that makes the C-suite feel like they're living in the future.
I know how this plays out. Not because I've observed it from the outside — because I lived it from the inside.
I signed that contract twice. Three-year terms, roughly $500K a year. All the bells and whistles. The vendor demos were dazzling. The ROI projections made sense on paper. Each time, my team told me they just needed more time, more training — that the value was coming. They were busy. They were always fighting fires. They were perpetually about to turn the corner.
They never did. Ten people in the department actually used the system. And they only used it for one thing: drawing lines on floor plans.
So: $3 million over six years. For a very expensive floor plan tool.
That's not a story about a bad vendor. It's not even really a story about bad software. It's a story about a fundamental mismatch between what enterprise platforms are designed to do and how facilities teams actually work. The system was built for the person who bought it. Not the person who had to use it every day between one crisis and the next.
The CMMS software industry has a dirty secret. Implementations fail to deliver their promised benefits between 50 and 70 percent of the time. And the culprit is almost never the software itself — it’s adoption. Research consistently shows that enterprises use fewer than 25% of the features they're paying for. The other 75%? Shelfware. Meanwhile, the team has gone back to the whiteboard. Your $500K system is an expensive PDF generator for quarterly reports that nobody reads.
The Gap Is the Opportunity
There's a reason Fawn Perazzo and I started building sonpito. We saw this gap from the inside. I spent nearly a decade at Salesforce, where I founded and scaled the RETECH organization. I watched real estate and facilities teams struggle with this exact problem across many, many organizations. The tools they were given were either too simple to scale or too complex to use.
The CMMS software market has evolved in one direction: more features, more complexity, more cost. Meanwhile, the people who actually maintain buildings — the Marias and Jakes and Tonys — need something that works on their phone while they're walking to a broken chiller. Something they can update in thirty seconds because that's all the time they have between fixing things.
That's not a technical problem. It's a design philosophy problem. The enterprise IWMS platforms are designed for the person buying the software. We think CMMS software should be designed for the person using it.
What "Simple But Serious" Looks Like
When we say simple, people sometimes hear "basic." That's wrong. Amazon's one-click ordering is simple. Is it basic? The best technology in the world disappears into the workflow. You don't notice it. You just do your job, and the data gets captured as a side effect.
That's what we're building at sonpito. A Salesforce-native CMMS where logging an issue takes five taps, not fifteen clicks. Where the vendor can update their work order from their phone without a training session. Where the director in Pleasanton can see real-time performance data without calling the facilities manager in San Francisco and asking for a report.
Simple input. Sophisticated output. And because it's built on Salesforce, the data governance is handled from day one — security, audit trails, reporting, all the things that make your IT and compliance teams happy without making your facilities team miserable.
Choosing Your CMMS Software
If you're evaluating CMMS software right now, my honest advice: ignore the feature comparison sheets. Every vendor will show you a matrix where they tick more boxes than the competition. Those boxes don't matter if your team won't use the system.
Instead, ask these questions: How long does it take to log a repair on a mobile phone? Can the new hire use it on day one without training? What's the actual adoption rate of your existing customers? And — this is the big one — will my team use this instead of WhatsApp, or in addition to it?
Because if the answer to that last question is "in addition to," you're about to join the majority of organizations paying for CMMS software that sits idle while the real work happens on a whiteboard.
I've been that person. I signed the contract twice. Don't be me.
There's a gap between the spreadsheet and the behemoth. That gap is where facility management actually happens. And it's where we're building.
