Cornerstone’s secret to preventive maintenance success

Cornerstone Building Brands is the largest manufacturer of exterior building products in North America, with over 50 plants supporting its diverse operations. Known for delivering high-quality, innovative solutions to customers across residential and commercial markets, Cornerstone’s success depends on the reliability of its manufacturing processes.

Challenge

When Maintenance Hero Award winner Ronnie Woodall joined Cornerstone as the Regional Maintenance & Production Manager, the company’s maintenance teams relied on spreadsheets and paper-based work orders to complete their work. This manual approach to maintenance management often led to a high rate of reactive maintenance and numerous inefficiencies. 

Key challenges included:

• Limited visibility into maintenance performance and downtime root causes
• Reactive maintenance culture, which diverted resources away from PMs
• Data limitations that made it challenging to report metrics and optimize resources  
• Cross-functional communication gaps between production, tool-change, and maintenance teams
• Lack of standardization that led to process inconsistencies and a lack of data integrity

These issues directly impacted equipment performance, maintenance efficiency, executive decision-making, and overall morale.

Solution

Woodall set out to modernize Cornerstone’s maintenance operations by finding a solution that would help them improve their preventive maintenance program and surface critical data insights. He had experience with various CMMS platforms and knew exactly what he was looking for to help achieve his goals. After seeing Limble’s user-friendly interface and custom reports in action, he knew it was the best solution for Cornerstone. Once implemented, Limble delivered immediate benefits.

• Data-driven reporting: Limble enabled Woodall to capture, analyze, and share real-time metrics, such as downtime hours, labor utilization, and PM completion rates. 
• Proactive maintenance: Teams shifted from “firefighting” to achieving PM goals, supported by automated PM scheduling and simple task prioritization.
• Team accountability: Woodall ensured transparency and accountability across departments by integrating tool-change teams and production supervisors into Limble.
• Scalable implementation: Following success at their initial location in Weston, North Carolina, Woodall began implementing Limble at Rocky Mount, Virginia – the largest extrusion plant in the U.S. – and supported the rollout across additional locations.
• Enterprise-level standardization: Limble’s centralized platform enabled consistent asset management practices, maintenance processes, and unified reporting across facilities.

Results

• 99% PM completion rate 
• 80% planned vs. reactive maintenance 
• 63% decrease in the number of downtime events

Cornerstone has achieved transformational results across its facilities with Limble. Woodall uses Limble to track key metrics and deliver actionable insights to the executive team, enabling data-driven decisions that optimize maintenance operations and maximize production.

With widespread adoption across the team, Cornerstone consistently tracks all maintenance key performance indicators (KPIs) within Limble, including labor utilization, PM completion rate, and downtime hours. With these insights at his fingertips, Woodall saw his team was at 100% labor utilization but still couldn’t complete all their PMs on time — a clear sign they were understaffed. Fortunately, Limble provided the data he needed to justify hiring a dedicated PM technician, making it easy to get approval quickly. With the additional technician and Limble optimizing their operations, Cornerstone was able to meet their ambitious goal of 99% PM completion. Woodall emphasizes how this “shift from firefighting to a proactive maintenance culture” has boosted overall efficiency, allowing technicians to focus on the most critical tasks.

Woodall has also leveraged the data in Limble to drive a new corporate initiative for identifying problematic assets or “bad actors” and proactively employing corrective actions. With this new program and a near-perfect PM completion rate, Cornerstone has reduced downtime occurrences by 63%, boosting equipment reliability and ensuring their production goals are consistently met. 

This success hasn’t gone unnoticed. Limble delivers company-wide visibility into maintenance operations and KPIs, showcasing Woodall and his team’s impressive impact on larger company goals: “With Limble I can build custom reports and feel 100% confident in the accuracy of the data I’m reporting each week. Reliable reporting has had a huge impact across multiple locations,” Woodall explains. Woodall’s effective use of Limble has made such a difference that Cornerstone’s leadership team expanded his area of oversight, asking him to implement his approach across multiple plants. 

Beyond the measurable improvements in KPIs, Limble has also positively affected team communication and morale. Having one platform where cross-functional teams can collaborate has been a “game changer,” Woodall notes. With downtime tracking readily accessible for the production and tool-change teams, Maintenance has increased accountability, resolved issues faster, and kept operations running smoothly. Scheduling has also improved dramatically. Thanks to real-time visibility into open work orders, it is now easier than ever for teams to plan their work each day. 

Cornerstone Building Brands’ experience with Limble isn’t just a success story – it’s a blueprint for what’s possible when maintenance teams are empowered with the right tools. By turning data into decisions, chaos into clarity, and firefighting into proactive maintenance, Ronnie Woodall and his team have redefined efficient, high-impact maintenance. From a 99% PM completion rate to enterprise-wide accountability, Limble didn’t just streamline operations – it elevated them.