Washoe County Streamlines Community Services Department’s Work with Brightly Software

The Concerns

Washoe County, which includes the cities of Reno, Sparks, and Lake Tahoe in northwestern Nevada, is growing fast. With 300 sunny days per year and plenty of opportunities for skiing, mountain biking and water sports, the county is a popular location, which experienced a nearly 6% population growth in the last three years.

As the population increases, the county government must manage growing demands. Its Community Services Department Operations Division is responsible for equipment services, facilities management, roads, and utility operations. In the past, the division had five different work order management systems in place, and managing all the different systems made it impossible to accurately prioritize projects, says Aaron Smith, Operations Director for the division. The county’s Community Services Department Operations Division needed to consolidate all its tasks, work orders, and work history in one shared environment.

The Solution

When Smith was hired in 2017, Washoe County was considering implementing a new software program to streamline and manage the projects of the Community Services Department. He quickly saw that the software program under consideration was not going to handle all the tasks that were needed. Brightly’s solution (Asset Essentials) was still under development, but after meeting with Brightly representatives and learning what the CMMS tool would do, Smith and his team decided to become early adopters. “Having a cloud-based solution makes it so easy for everyone to use it from wherever they are,” Smith says. “Over the past seven years, Asset Essentials has changed and evolved a lot, and it has been a great tool for us.”

The Results

With Brightly, Washoe County’s Community Services Department has a single source of truth to access data for making informed decisions. The software tracks labor costs, parts, and materials for every work order and makes it easy for decision makers to get visibility of various needs.

For example, workers in the carpentry division “kept telling us we needed more carpenters, but those requests were only anecdotal,” Smith says. “Once we had clear data from Asset Essentials, we could see that about 25% of the work orders coming in were carpentry related, but with our current staff, we were only able to do about 10% of those per year. Having that evidence allowed us to get two new positions in carpentry so we could better fulfill customer needs.”

The solution has also helped improve communication inefficiencies. For example, in the past, when someone needed a job done in a facility, “they would just call the technician and shoulder tap them,” Smith says. “Now, we ask people to create a work order in Asset Essentials so we can prioritize those tasks. By being able to prioritize every work order, we’re able to focus on doing the tasks that will create more value in the limited time we have.”

In 2025, the Community Services Department enhanced its reporting by adding the Data Share add-on to Asset Essentials. The tool automates data retrieval into interactive dashboards, cutting manual work and uniting information from multiple systems for clearer reporting. Smith’s team, for example, can now compare timecard data with Asset Essentials in a single view, which improves workload visibility, accountability, and recognition for achievements.

Next, the team plans to build an asset cost dashboard to strengthen business cases for replacements and demonstrate ROI with policymakers. The Community Services Department is competing with 23 other county departments for capital project funding. Asset Essentials and Data Share together provide a fuller picture, helping to guide decision-making and justify investments going forward. “We were already evidence-based, but the evidence was harder to get to. With Data Share, it’s right at our fingertips,” Smith says.