Apollo America

About Apollo America

Apollo America is one of the world's largest manufacturers of smoke detectors, modules, and notification devices. Established in 1980, Apollo has become one of the top five manufacturers in their industry, specializing in the design and manufacture of high-quality detection products.

Terry Horicutt is a facilities and maintenance manager at Apollo America in Auburn Hill, Michigan. Terry has been working at Apollo America for two years but brings in his 25 years of facilities management experience.

Watch the full interview with Terry Horicutt

Pointless paper and cumbersome spreadsheets

Throughout Terry’s maintenance career, he’s used everything from pen-and- paper to Excel for tracking and planning maintenance. “Of course, the world runs on Excel, right. So that was a big part of my experience over the last 25 years,” says Terry. He remembers when they first transitioned from work orders on pen and paper because it too hard to keep track of loose papers. So, when they started with Excel, “We thought, wow, now we're in the big time, right?”

When you're doing pen and paper and then to Excel there is zero accountability.

However, even with the help of Excel, there were big gaps in accountability, and it still required a fair amount of manual work to ensure the information being entered was correct and accurate. The problem was he didn’t know anything better existed in the industry until he moved to Apollo America.

Breaking away from the status-quo

Upon joining Apollo America, Terry found himself looking at an incredibly powerful asset (Fiix CMMS). They already had Fiix CMMS in place, but the software was being underutilized, and he wanted to change that.

He mentions, "Coming from the medical industry, I worked at hospitals, and we use similar programs there. But when I came to Apollo, I realized that Fiix CMMS was worth having, we just weren't using it."

Building trust and embracing skills are key to technology adoption

Adopting a new technology within organizations often hinges on the trust in the leadership team implementing the software. As an incoming manager at Apollo America, Terry made it his mission to build the relationships needed to get the buy-in for integrating Fiix CMMS into the company's operations.

It's relationship building. Once you have that trust, it's a lot easier to implement change.

As someone who was new to maintenance software like Fiix CMMS, Terry recognized the challenges of embracing new technology. He suggests leaning on the younger generations joining the workforce. Terry explains, "Take advantage of these young people that come into your company, the older people...we really struggle with the technology changes...But the younger people...they don't struggle with this stuff. This is second nature to them. Use them, trust them."

By embracing the insights of diverse team members and leveraging external resources, companies can effectively navigate the complexities of integrating new technologies into their workflows.