How one Michigan fabrication shop moved 5 years of Excel maintenance history into Myncel in a single afternoon — and what they learned along the way.
When Dave Chen, maintenance manager at Great Lakes Fabrication in Kalamazoo, Michigan, first called us, he had a very specific problem: a spreadsheet that had grown so large it crashed Excel when he tried to sort it.
"We started the spreadsheet when we bought our first CNC in 2019," Dave told us. "By 2024 it was 4,200 rows across three tabs. Nobody trusted it anymore. Half the team had their own versions saved locally. It was chaos."
The thing that had kept Dave from switching sooner wasn't cost or effort — it was loss of history. Five years of maintenance records lived in that spreadsheet. Repair dates. Part numbers. Vendor contacts. Failure patterns that Dave had mentally catalogued over hundreds of incidents.
"I was worried if we switched, we'd lose all that context," he said. "Our newest CNC had a bearing failure pattern I'd been tracking for two years. That data was valuable."
Most shops that delay switching to a CMMS cite fear of losing historical data. In practice, migrating your most important historical records takes 2–3 hours, and you only need the last 12–18 months of data to establish meaningful baselines.
Dave scheduled a Friday afternoon for the migration. He brought in his lead technician, Maria, who had been with the shop for eight years and knew the equipment history better than anyone.
Here's the process they used, which took about 3 hours total:
Dave entered all 14 machines into Myncel — name, model, year, location. For each machine, he added the manufacturer's recommended PM schedule from the manual (or from memory, for older equipment). Maria added photos of each machine's nameplate from her phone.
Rather than importing every row of the spreadsheet, they focused on the last 12 months. Dave filtered his spreadsheet to 2024 and entered the most significant events — major repairs, parts replacements, and recurring issues — as historical work orders in Myncel. Non-critical routine entries were left behind.
Dave added his four technicians to Myncel and assigned machines to each one. He set up email alerts for overdue PMs and configured the weekly summary to go to himself and the shop owner. By 5 PM, Myncel had sent the first maintenance reminder.
Three months after the migration, we checked back in with Dave. A few things surprised him:
"Once everything was in Myncel and I could see the overdue list, I realized we had 11 past-due PM tasks across 6 machines. In the spreadsheet, things just quietly fell through the cracks. The dashboard made the backlog visible for the first time."
"I expected pushback. Instead, within a week Maria was logging work orders from her phone between jobs. She said it was faster than finding the spreadsheet, opening it, scrolling to the right machine, and figuring out which tab to update."
"Six weeks after going live, we got an alert that the hydraulic press was overdue for a seal inspection. Maria did the inspection and found a seal that was failing — caught it before it blew. That repair cost $340 scheduled. The emergency repair + downtime would have been $4,200. That one catch covered our Myncel subscription for 12 months."
If you're planning a similar migration, here's what we've learned from helping dozens of shops make the switch:
The goal isn't to preserve everything. It's to move forward with the data that actually matters — and build better habits going forward.
Myncel is built for exactly this scenario. Most shops are fully set up in 2–4 hours. Start your free trial today — no credit card required.
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