GATX is a Fortune 1000 company and one of the largest rail car lessors in North America. Their Canadian operations include multiple rail maintenance facilities, tank car depots, and yard operations across Quebec and Ontario. The facility services footprint spans active rail yards, industrial maintenance buildings, office space, and regulated waste handling areas.
Before engaging Simple Service Group, GATX’s Canadian facilities were serviced through a patchwork of independent vendors:
The coordination overhead was costing facility management time, procurement was maintaining compliance documentation across 8+ vendors, and environmental compliance had gaps — open-hose rail car washing was generating municipal storm drain concerns and the risk of regulatory citation.
The engagement consolidated all of the above into a single integrated contract:
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Vendors across facility services scope | 11 | 1 |
| Monthly invoices to process | 11+ | 1 |
| Environmental non-compliance events / year | 12 | 0 |
| AP time per month (estimated) | ~10-14 hrs | ~1-2 hrs |
| Separate COI / compliance files | 11 | 1 |
| Emergency response SLA | Best-effort | 4 hrs |
| Facility manager vendor-coordination time | Several hrs/wk | Near-zero |
Procurement verification simplified. Instead of maintaining 11 separate vendor compliance files, the GATX procurement team verifies one integrated contract with all compliance documentation centralized. Annual COI renewals, WSIB/CNESST certificates, and safety training records consolidated.
Environmental compliance permanently addressed. The previous open-hose rail car wash practice generated 12 municipal storm drain concerns in the year prior to engagement. Since transition, every wash is performed with full containment and reclaim protocols: containment berm deployed, absorbent boom staged, reclaim water pumped into sealed drums, manifested to licensed disposal. Zero events in 12 months.
Rail-yard-certified crews. All crews are pre-trained on yard safety (blue flag, catenary awareness, yard radio protocols, three-point contact). Facility managers spend zero time orienting new crews to yard-specific safety requirements.
Single point of accountability. One named account manager with direct phone and email, replacing the prior dispatch-line coordination across multiple vendors. Emergency response SLA (4 hours) is written into the contract rather than best-effort.
If you are coordinating facility services vendors across multiple sites today — and you recognize any of the patterns above — the GATX model is replicable for your organization. Simple Service Group operates this integrated contract structure under our Axiom Facilities Management arm, with specialist sub-brands for each service line.
Facility services spend at most enterprise accounts goes to 8-12 different invoices every month already. Consolidation is a procurement-efficiency play as much as a service-quality play.