The knowledge that lived in one person's head

When Marc Brunel joined his father's company in 2019, he inherited two things: a reputation built over twenty years of reliable service, and a filing system he describes, with affection, as "organised chaos."

The reputation was easier to keep than the filing system was to fix.

Brunel & Sons had been servicing laboratory and diagnostic equipment across the Brussels metropolitan area since 2001, when Marc's father Didier founded it with two technicians and a van. By the time Marc came on board, the company had grown to eleven people, three vans, and a client list that included some of the largest hospital networks in Belgium. The filing system had grown with it — laterally, in all directions, without a plan.

"My father knew where everything was," Marc says. "That was both impressive and terrifying."

A business built on trust, running on memory

What institutional knowledge actually looks like

Didier Brunel's ability to hold the entire operation in his head was, for a long time, a competitive advantage. He knew which hospital preferred morning visits. He knew which devices at which sites were approaching end-of-life. He knew which technician had the most experience with a particular manufacturer's equipment and could route jobs accordingly. He knew all of this without writing it down, because he had learned it over two decades of doing the work.

The problem was not that this knowledge existed. The problem was that it existed exclusively in one person.

When Didier reduced his hours in 2022 to manage a health issue, the gap became visible almost immediately. Not a crisis — the team was skilled and loyal and had absorbed enough of Didier's methods to keep things running. But running things that had previously run on memory required more effort than anyone had anticipated. Jobs that would previously have been routed intuitively now required a conversation. Device histories that Didier could recall without looking took time to find or, in some cases, couldn't be found at all.

"We had the knowledge," Marc says. "We just didn't have it anywhere someone else could reach it."

The bilingual coordination problem

Brunel & Sons operates across French-speaking and Dutch-speaking hospital networks in and around Brussels — a coordination reality that most service software isn't built for, and that the company had managed through relationships and long experience rather than systems.

Different hospitals had different administrative cultures. Different contact preferences. Different expectations about how and when service would be communicated. Didier had navigated this through decades of accumulated rapport. Marc needed a system that could hold some of that context, so it didn't have to be rebuilt from scratch each time a new technician was introduced to a client.

The decision to build a proper foundation

What convinced Marc

Marc had been looking at operational software on and off since he joined. He had not found anything that felt built for a company like theirs — small enough to be nimble, complex enough to need structure, operating in a niche that most software companies didn't understand deeply.

What changed his mind about Mediora was a conversation with another independent service operator at a trade event in Ghent in early 2024. Not a sales pitch — a peer telling him, specifically, what had changed in their daily operations after six months on the platform. The specificity was persuasive in a way that a demo couldn't be.

He signed up for a trial the following week.

What the migration required

Moving eleven years of service history into a structured system is not a technical problem. It is a translation problem. The records that Brunel & Sons held — some digital, some paper, some existing only in the emails of people who had since left — had to be interpreted, reconciled, and entered in a form the system could use.

Marc spent three weeks on this before the team went live, working with Mediora's onboarding team to build a device record for every piece of equipment in the fleet. It was, he says, the most useful three weeks he had spent since joining the company.

"Building the records forced us to have conversations we'd been putting off. Which clients were we actually profitable with. Which devices were overdue for replacement conversations. Which contracts needed renegotiating." The system didn't surface those questions — the act of systematising did.

Six months on

The change Marc notices most is not a metric. It is that he no longer has calls from technicians asking questions he can't quickly answer. The information they need is in the system, attached to the device, accessible from the van.

Brunel & Sons onboarded a new technician in March 2025 — the first new hire since Marc joined. The onboarding took four days. Marc estimates it would have taken six weeks under the old system, most of which would have been informal knowledge transfer from whoever happened to be available.

"My father built this company on knowing everything himself," Marc says. "What we're building now is a company that knows things even when nobody specific is around to remember them."

Didier, who still comes in twice a week, has started adding notes to the device records himself.

What they would tell another family-run service company

Start with the device records. Not the scheduling, not the reporting, not the workflow automation. The device records first — because everything else becomes useful only once the foundation is solid.

And do not wait for the moment when the knowledge in someone's head becomes unavailable. That moment arrives either through retirement, illness, or departure, and all three versions are worse than the alternative.

"We were lucky," Marc says. "We caught it before it became a problem. Most people wait until after."