Case Study: Bracebridge, ON
From Scattered to Streamlined: How Bracebridge Modernized Public Works
Table of Contents
Overview
The Town of Bracebridge, ON is a Muskoka community of roughly 17,000 residents known for its small-town character and strong civic identity. Their Public Works department maintains 320 km of roads, 38 parks, and a 72 km trail network. To keep pace with this scope, the Town explored municipal maintenance management software that could support consistent planning, tracking, and reporting.
Introduction
Bracebridge’s Public Works team relied on a mix of spreadsheets, paper records, and standalone tools to manage work orders, service requests, and field data. Each piece of information lived in its own place, disconnected from the rest.
As seasonal demands and daily operations grew more complex, those gaps became harder to work around. The Town needed a way to bring that information together without disrupting the daily routines Public Works staff already relied on. That search led them to Citywide Maintenance, implemented across Public Works, Parks, Facilities, and Fleet.
Challenge
The underlying problem was clear: staff needed to track crew time, equipment, materials, and invoices accurately enough for reporting, but simply enough to fit daily operations. Since financial systems lagged behind fieldwork, it was difficult to get timely answers on where maintenance dollars were going.
Seasonal and emergency work made this harder:
Winter maintenance
Brushing and patching
Emergency storm response
Without a centralized workflow, pulling documentation together for management, council, or funding applications took significant manual effort. The Town needed one place to hold work records, costs, and documents together.
Solution
Citywide Maintenance is now the unified platform for Public Works, Parks, Facilities, and Fleet. This municipal work order management approach ensures staff capture work as it happens and tie it directly to assets and locations through:
Activity-based and asset-based work orders
Service requests
Preventive maintenance scheduling
Routine inspections
Mobile field data collection
Crews log cost and resource data on an ongoing basis, including daily time and materials, from mobile tablets in the field, invoices and records from admin staff as they come in. That keeps information current, so managers can review maintenance activity without waiting on delayed financial reports.
The solution also extends beyond day-to-day maintenance:
The Citywide Customer Portal and customized address search support resident service requests with better location accuracy
Legacy data migration brought historical records into the new system
Integrations with payroll, fuel, and AVL systems connect the maintenance environment to the Town's broader operations
A train-the-trainer approach helped build internal confidence and drive adoption
“We could compile all our invoices, our daily labour, equipment, and material into one place, giving us all the invoices of work orders and a running tally of budget versus actual.”
– Amy Slater, Administrative Assistant for Public Works, Town of Bracebridge
“
It was very easy to pull the numbers needed to see what we spent on the storm and exactly what we spent it on.
“
Amy Slater
Administrative Assistant for Public Works, Town of Bracebridge
Result
Staff now have a clear, current picture of maintenance activity across day-to-day work — supporting faster budget decisions and stronger reporting.
That visibility paid off during the 2025 spring ice storm:
Work and documentation were already organized in the system
Finance staff pulled the cost data needed for a provincial funding application
No need to reconstruct the event from scratch
Public Works crews, admin staff, and managers now work from a single source of truth — less duplication, more consistency in how maintenance data gets captured and reviewed.
Conclusion
Bracebridge shows what happens when a municipality brings work orders, mobile field data, service requests, and documentation into one place: a maintenance workflow built for daily reality, not just best-case scenarios.
Three years in, the system holds up for routine work and rises to the occasion for emergencies and special projects — proof that the right foundation pays off long after go-live.
