Case Study | Récup Estrie
Récup Estrie Now Plans 97% of Its Maintenance Work in Advance
The Régie de récupération de l’Estrie (commonly known as Récup Estrie) is a public body that sorts and recovers recyclable materials for the Estrie region of Quebec.
Founded in 1995 to serve more than 200,000 residents, Récup Estrie operates a material recovery facility (MRF) and brought its maintenance in-house in 2018. Two years after adopting Maintenance Directe CMMS, it had already achieved an 80% increase in predictive maintenance. The goal at the time was to standardize maintenance procedures and give mechanics better tools for their day-to-day work.
How a well-deployed CMMS transformed equipment management
The Challenge
Before starting its transition to Maintenance Directe in 2020, Récup Estrie managed its equipment fleet in a largely reactive way: that year, it logged 384 corrective work orders against only 217 preventive ones. In other words, nearly two-thirds of all maintenance work consisted of repairs after the fact rather than planned maintenance. This imbalance is familiar to any organization running a large equipment fleet without a structured system: unplanned breakdowns drive the schedule, parts are missing when they’re needed most, and the maintenance team spends more time reacting than preventing.
The Right Technology
Récup Estrie has been an official Maintenance Directe customer since January 2021. The CMMS structured maintenance for the company’s 129 assets around individual asset records, each with defined maintenance frequencies, assigned tasks, and work orders generated automatically on a set schedule rather than in response to failures.
Between 2020 and 2025, the number of completed preventive work orders increased more than 37-fold, while corrective work orders declined, even as the fleet of tracked assets grew. In 2025, nearly all maintenance work (97%) was planned in advance rather than unplanned, and even the year’s 259 corrective work orders were scheduled rather than handled as emergencies.
Data through the end of August 2026 (3,567 preventive and 148 corrective work orders) confirms that this planned maintenance discipline is now firmly embedded in Récup Estrie’s operations, not a one-time effect of the first year after deployment.
The Right Team
Beyond the software, Récup Estrie has relied on Maintenance Directe for all of its maintenance parts procurement since the start of the relationship. The 1,811 parts currently in inventory are managed directly in the CMMS, linking planned maintenance to the actual availability of the parts needed to carry it out.
This means Récup Estrie’s team isn’t juggling a maintenance system on one side and a separate purchasing process on the other: planning, execution, and procurement all rely on a single source of truth, from the office to the shop floor.
How We Help You Succeed
- Hands-on support from deployment onward to build asset records and maintenance schedules, not just software access.
- Spare parts inventory management integrated with work planning, reducing delays caused by missing parts.
- Long-term follow-up: Récup Estrie’s results don’t rest on a single good year, but on a trend sustained over several fiscal years.
Récup Estrie’s experience shows what a well-adopted CMMS can change in an organization: not just a tracking tool, but a real lever for shifting from a repair culture to a prevention culture.
Choosing the CMMS Best Suited to Their Needs
Beyond wanting a simple, easy-to-adopt solution, management’s priority was to move away from purely corrective maintenance and strengthen predictive maintenance in order to reduce equipment maintenance and repair costs.
Maintenance Directe offers innovative solutions to help Récup Estrie optimize predictive maintenance across its industrial operations. To automate data collection and receive rapid alerts when problems arise, smart sensors were strategically installed to count production cycles and monitor vibration and temperature, among other parameters. Based on the predictive maintenance thresholds configured, the smart sensors integrated with the CMMS can capture many other critical insights that support informed decision-making. Our CMMS solution thus brings Industry 5.0 best practices into the client’s processes.
A Solution with Multiple Benefits
- For Récup Estrie, the benefits of Maintenance Directe are numerous:
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Automated data collection; -
Informed decision-making through predictive maintenance;
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Processes aligned with Industry 5.0 best practices;
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Reduced equipment maintenance and repair costs;
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Ability to add CMMS modules as needs evolve.
Concrete, Satisfying Results
Today, Récup Estrie’s senior management expresses strong satisfaction with our CMMS solution.
“As maintenance manager, Maintenance Directe has given us better visibility over our work and our equipment. It makes planning, tracking work orders, and managing priorities easier.
It’s simple and intuitive to use, which makes it easy for the team to adopt. It also keeps a reliable maintenance history, lets us track recurring issues, and helps us better justify repairs and capital investments.
Day to day, it saves me time, keeps me more organized, and helps me make better decisions.”
At Maintenance Directe, we’re also proud that this client values the availability and responsiveness of our technical support experts.
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