Sporting Kansas City manages seven facilities, 1,400 tracked assets and a game-day workforce of around 700 people. Here’s how the club is gaining greater visibility into critical equipment, identifying issues earlier and giving teams more time to act with Mitti.
7
Facilities across Kansas City
~1,400
Assets tracked across its operations
700
Staff on game day
Sensors
Assets
From an 18,000-seat stadium to training centers, youth complexes and a downtown office, Sporting Kansas City's operations team has a lot of ground to cover.
Led by Josh Blackford, VP of Operations and Stadium GM, the team oversees major soccer matches, hundreds of private events and the facilities and assets that support them.
With approximately 1,400 assets to keep track of, knowing what needs attention is just as important as knowing what's happening across each location.
Josh has one rule:
“I have a no-surprise rule. In my position, I want to be consistently aware of what's happening at any given time across the multitude of facilities that we have.”
But with people, equipment and facilities spread across the city, keeping that awareness isn't easy. Equipment can fail overnight, problems can emerge during event preparations and there's little room for last-minute surprises when thousands of fans are arriving.
Sporting Kansas City introduced Mitti Sensors to give its food and beverage team continuous visibility into critical kitchen equipment.
Connected sensors monitor temperatures in walk-in coolers and freezers around the clock, automatically alerting staff when readings move outside their expected range.
Previously, the team relied on physical checks to identify problems. Now, staff can monitor equipment remotely and respond when attention is needed.
“With the sensor equipment, we've now got 24/7 coverage and eyes on how our equipment and our assets are behaving. We didn't have that previously.”
The value became clear almost immediately.
During the first week of using Mitti Sensors, Chef Joe received an alert that one of the stadium's freezers was getting too warm.
It was game day, and the stadium was preparing to welcome thousands of fans. The early warning gave the team time to bring in technicians and replace the faulty equipment, avoiding a last-minute transfer of food to another warehouse.
With upwards of $20,000 worth of food in a fully stocked game-day freezer, catching the issue early mattered.
“Having the Mitti sensors and the technology downstairs now in our kitchens knocked the ball out of the park for us immediately. We've seen a quick ROI and a quick win.”
Refrigeration breakdown is a frequent cause of stock loss in food service. But with continuous monitoring, it means that a failing freezer is flagged in minutes, so what could have been a spoilage claim for Sporting KC now becomes a routine repair.
For Josh, the ambition goes beyond monitoring equipment. He wants frontline teams to be able to flag issues as they happen, with information reaching the stadium's command post and the people responsible for acting on it.
“Getting the right information to the right people at the right time.”
It's part of his philosophy of getting 1% better every day. Across seven facilities, thousands of assets and hundreds of events, small improvements can add up.
