Scaling facilities operations with IBM Maximo: How Mitie handles 3 million monthly tickets and 30-minute SLAs

Facilities management is a high-volume, high-variance engineering problem: millions of service requests, heterogeneous assets, tight service-level agreements (SLAs) and constant pressure to improve utilization without increasing risk.

For London-based Mitie Group plc, the UK’s leading facilities management company, delivering workplace and building services safely, quickly and at scale amounts to an always-on pipeline. The organization raises as many as 3 million tickets per month, with the IBM Maximo® Application Suite at the heart of it, handling materials and workforce allocation across multiple instances with tight SLAs.

For the most demanding scenarios, SLAs can be as low as 30 minutes. It is an aggressive target in dense urban environments where dispatching the right technician fast is often the difference between contained impact and cascading disruption.

Mitie’s end users are the people who occupy, travel through, work in and rely upon built environments every day—offices, transport hubs, hospitals and other complex sites. If you live or work in the UK, you might well be a Mitie end-user and not even know it. The user experience goal is straightforward: Enable facilities managers to maintain and resolve issues quickly enough that the end users don’t notice the intervention.

The challenge? “Facilities” isn’t one workload. A single ticket stream includes everything from lower-priority comfort issues to high-priority safety and continuity events, such as leaks or critical equipment failures.

Meeting a 30-minute SLA under that variability requires three things to be consistently true:

1. The right work is triaged and prioritized fast.
2. The right technician is dispatched with the right context.
3. The technician can make progress immediately, or escalate to expertise without delay.

The value delivered to end users is measured in time-to-containment and time-to-resolution. Remote assistance is a good example: an onsite worker can be guided to take the first stabilizing step (for example, shutting off a valve to stop a leak) to stop user disruption quickly, while permanent repair can be scheduled downstream.

Mitie’s architecture is organized around Maximo as the system of record and workflow engine, with surrounding systems providing scheduling, mobility, analytics and user access.

This end-state architecture can be described as a “satellite” model around the Maximo core, alongside a deliberate shift toward “suite-first” consolidation—moving capabilities that were previously external into the Maximo Application Suite footprint.

IBM Maximo serves as the central platform where work “starts and ends,” including SLAs, materials, staffing and work allocation.

Two satellite tools, Clik and “MiJobs” (a mobile app developed in-house), are used for scheduling and mobile assistance; they’re connected through a middleware layer to Maximo.

The Mitie team is exploring Maximo Remote Assist (named Maximo Collaborate in version 9.1) to improve its ability to meet tight SLAs and reduce dependency on physically moving experts to sites.

Maximo Collaborate employs AI and augmented reality to help technicians troubleshoot and repair equipment problems more efficiently. The remote assistant also helps to connect veteran technicians with newer workers to pass on their expertise. This assistant is key to enriching the next generation of technicians as the current workforce moves toward retirement.

In asset and facilities operations, portals and chat entry points are commonly fronted by role-based access controls and API mediation. This position is necessary to separate customer visibility from internal operations, improving the security posture while keeping user journeys simple.

Mitie developed a dedicated area called ESME (“enable and support me”) that enables chatbot capability and room-booking workflows. A separate client portal exposes operational data to Mitie’s customers so stakeholders can view relevant service information.

A data lake supports analytics, with Power BI used for reporting.

Mitie’s deployment choices were driven by governance requirements and the need for operational control:

• Maximo runs as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) rather than SaaS, specifically to retain full control due to customer demands.
• The organization uses both AWS and Azure as part of a multicloud strategy, separating commercial workloads (AWS) from more secure contracts (Azure).
• UK government security requirements (including Ministry of Defence expectations) drove the need for UK-hosted, special-server setups.

Maximo Application Suite is built on Red Hat® OpenShift® for hybrid-cloud portability, including multicloud and on-premises deployment options.

Two engineering decisions stood out as critical ways to simplify and improve Mitie’s architecture:

• Configuration over customization: The team avoids customization as much as possible, relying on initial behavior and configuration to keep upgrades and changes manageable.
• Upgrade velocity as an operational KPI: A major upgrade was completed in about 90 days, with no P1/P0 incidents and only minor third-party integration issues.

The flexibility of the Maximo Application Suite (including its integrated applications and hybrid-cloud capabilities) has brought a host of practical benefits to Mitie engineers and technical product managers. Broadly, the Mitie team reports that the biggest driver of decreased total cost of ownership (TCO) comes from integration capabilities and lightened operational burden.

1. Suite consolidation reduces integration surface area. Moving from many “satellite” applications into a suite model built around Maximo reduces the number of systems to be integrated, synchronized, secured and upgraded.
2. Initial orientation improves change throughput. Avoiding custom code enabled rapid upgrades and reduced the risk of major incidents during version jumps.
3. Remote assistance supports SLA containment and workforce scaling. Remote expert guidance can help stabilize incidents quickly and reduce costly travel for specialized expertise—especially when geographically distributed sites and aging equipment are involved.
4. Performance gains on modern platform foundations. The move to newer platform components delivered double the performance on the same infrastructure, even while infrastructure build complexity increased.

Mitie recently upgraded all of its Maximo instances to Maximo Application Suite 9.1, providing a consistent, modern platform that supports automation, AI and analytics at scale, without the drag of mixed versions or legacy constraints. Compared to previous versions, 9.1 is providing Mitie with significantly better performance and little to no failures, as shown in the performance charts.

Mitie’s Maximo architecture shows what scale looks like in real facilities operations: millions of monthly tickets, aggressive SLAs and a workforce model that must evolve as experienced technicians retire.

The ability to add capacity is an important scalability lever. At the same time, reducing the marginal cost of each new workflow—new sites, new customer requirements and new channels—without rebuilding the foundation each time is equally critical.

By building on IBM’s Maximo platform with a suite-first consolidation mindset, Mitie is turning high-volume facilities ticketing into a more modular, portable operating model. A model that can absorb new sites, new service lines and new workforce constraints while continuing to improve the day-to-day experience of the people who rely on the buildings and infrastructure it helps to maintain.

Learn more about Maximo Application Suite