How centrexIT recovered 160+ hours a month and opened a new service line using Rewst

Customer story

At a glance

centrexIT, a San Diego–based MSP, made automation a dedicated function and used Rewst to move repetitive service desk work off its technicians' plates so the team could spend more time on higher-value work. Its automation group, known internally as the Autobots, hands its three-person service desk more than 160 hours a month back on tier-one tasks alone.

centrexIT surfaces what to automate through Vantage, a tool built in-house to capture staff feedback about the manual work that frustrates people most and turn in into a prioritized list of fixes. It organizes the resulting automations into "toolboxes" that each department owns and uses daily, and has begun offering the same approach for clients as Automation as a Service.

Key results

160+

hours per month saved on tier-one service desk tasks

~33%

more service desk capacity unlocked across a three-person team

minute Pax8-to-QuickBooks licensing reconciliation, from 8-10 hours

~25

minutes per day returned to tier-one operators from one onboarding automation

$60-70k

estimated saved for one client with automation-as-a-service project

centrexIT takes a people-first, security-driven approach to IT and cybersecurity, and its automation team, the Autobots, is built to balance experience, security, and new thinking.

Josh Hohbein, the company's cybersecurity and automation manager, leads the team and keeps every build tied to business value, priority, and, above all, security and compliance.

Toby Peterson, senior automation engineer, brings a seasoned developer's background and the hard-won fundamentals that keep automations solid as they scale.

Jonathan Christensen, automation engineer, is the newest to the field and one of the team's biggest drivers: he brings the new-age toolkit of AI, agents, and modern platforms, and shows why it pays to put someone genuinely excited about automation in that seat.

The turning point

Someone has to own it

centrexIT treated automation as a real responsibility rather than an afterthought. About a year ago it brought together Josh, Toby, and Jonathan as the Autobots to speed up internal work and prepare to offer automation to clients. What made the difference was ownership, not size: someone with clear responsibility, protected time, and accountability for showing results. That can start with a single person, even one balancing automation with other duties, as long as the time is protected. What it looks like depends on the team; the point is that automation gets real attention.

"Even if it's a department of one, there needs to be somebody whose dedicated role this is. If you make it part of someone's task — here's another hat to throw on — you're not going to get good results, and you run into that accountability and follow-through issue. Somebody has to take ownership of it and do the work and show the results."

— Josh Hohbein, Manager of Cybersecurity and Automation at centrexIT

The team's method for winning buy-in came from meeting people where they were. Josh spent years on a restaurant new-store-opening team, working the line to spot inefficiencies before suggesting changes, and he runs automation the same way: sit with the service desk, watch how they work, hear what frustrates them, build a fix, then follow through so they see it land.

"You're not just saying you'll fix this and handing over a solution. You show up, you hear their frustrations, you provide a solution, and then you have their back. That's really how you get buy-in."

— Josh Hohbein, centrexIT

The challenge

Adoption, not building, was the hard part

centrexIT could build automations faster than it could get people to use them. The technical ability was there; the wall was adoption.

As a remote company, day-to-day frustrations stayed siloed and hard to surface, and without a steady way to capture and act on them, early wins stayed isolated instead of compounding into a program. That showed up like:

Onboarding one client meant adding each new hire to 80+ Microsoft Teams groups by hand, 20 to 30 error-prone minutes per ticket
Monthly license reconciliation fell to one person checking dozens to hundreds of line entries by hand
Improvement ideas came only through submission forms the busiest staff skipped, and the third-party idea platform the team tried shut down

Individually minor, together they stalled the appetite to automate before it could take hold.

The solution

Toolboxes, Vantage, and an AI-assisted build in Rewst

centrexIT uses Rewst as the orchestration layer, with Claude and Codex on top to build and scale workflows, and organizes the results into department-owned toolboxes.

Architecture

The solution spans the systems centrexIT and its clients run on every day:

Rewst — workflow orchestration across the stack (centrexIT has been a partner for over a year)
Microsoft Graph and Teams — the environment most client work runs against
Pax8 — source data for licensing and billing
QuickBooks Online — billing output
SharePoint — maintained sources of truth for onboarding data
Claude and Codex / Claude Code — AI assistance for building and scaling workflows
Microsoft Foundry — building and chaining agents into modular, reusable pieces

What a technician sees is a toolbox. The service desk toolbox holds around 20 live automations, each a bundle of three to ten workflows running behind the scenes, and a separate client toolbox handles reporting for technical account managers. Jonathan frames the toolbox as giving the contributing team ownership of the final product.

"It's a place they go to that they own as users. They like using it, they care about its functionality, and we've got a robust feedback system, so they're always telling us something."

— Jonathan Christensen, Automation Engineer at centrexIT

How the work operates

Vantage is where the team captures what to automate next. Built in-house on Rewst and AI agents after an outside idea platform fell short, it scans participation-oriented channels for frustrations and ideas, then surfaces who owns a related initiative and invites people to add to it. The approach replaced the failed submission forms and turned a team that was once begging for ideas into one with a backlog of more than 100 initiatives. Vantage also weighs quality-of-life factors, not only hours saved, so a task that is miserable rather than merely slow can still earn a place in sprint planning.

Two automation builds show the range. For the Teams onboarding problem, Toby made a SharePoint document the source of truth, then scraped it and fed it into a sub-workflow of the standard onboarding process so the right users are added to all 80-plus groups automatically. For licensing, he built a Pax8-to-QuickBooks reconciliation that uses fuzzy matching to check each line against a master template, flags anything below full confidence, and formats the output correctly.

"Normally that was one person spending 8 to 10 hours a month looking at every individual line, anywhere from 60 to 550 entries. Now it's about 95% accurate, flags the ones it isn't sure about, and it's down to 15 minutes or less. Originally it was just miserable."

— Toby Peterson, Senior Automation Engineer at centrexIT

Operational impact

Together, those automations take roughly a full-time employee's worth of repetitive work off the three-person service desk each month, giving the same team about a third more capacity for higher-value work.

The onboarding automation gives tier-one operators about 25 minutes of their day back on a task no one learned anything from, and the licensing reconciliation turned an 8-to-10-hour monthly slog into a 15-minute one. That reclaimed time goes toward work that needs a person's judgment rather than repetition. Because the runs happen in the background, the team mostly notices them by their absence.

Automation has become the service desk's default way of working, the first thing the team reaches for rather than an extra step on top of the job.

"We've automated so much of it that it's the core process. It's the first thing we do and how we work." — Josh Hohbein, centrexIT

Toby and Jonathan are careful to frame the gains as amplification rather than replacement, and the team has kept that promise: no roles eliminated, no hiring delayed. As Toby puts it, the point is to give people superpowers, not to automate anyone out of a job.

Financial impact

The recovered 160-plus hours a month give the team back a full-time employee's worth of capacity to put toward client work and higher-value tasks. That reinvested time is the return that makes the platform easy to justify internally.

That same value extends to clients. centrexIT has started delivering automation as a service, and its early client projects show the model's potential. For one client bound by state reporting requirements, three managers spent about six hours a day categorizing daily check-in forms by hand. Toby built a system that ingests the forms, processes them into a database, scans for anomalies, files everything in SharePoint, and produces weekly follow-up reports — an estimated $60,000 to $70,000 a year in savings for the client, from roughly four to five days of build time.

Those wins change the relationship. The client came back with more inquiries, and the conversation shifted from selling technology to demonstrating what automation could do for them. centrexIT is still maturing how it delivers the service, but the direction is set: the automation capability it built for itself is becoming a client-facing offering and a reason clients stay.

Strategic takeaway

Don't wait to start

centrexIT's results did not come from any one tool. They came from starting, and from building the foundations underneath: putting Rewst to work, earning adoption across the team, and standardizing how they build. As Josh puts it, there is never a perfect moment when every ticket is handled and every client is caught up, so you go for it. A year of that groundwork is what turned a handful of scattered wins into something the whole business now runs on.

The habit that made it scale was reuse. The team builds solid, general pieces once and adapts them, instead of rebuilding from scratch for every situation.

"Fundamentally a car works the same for everybody — 80% is identical, and the 20% is the features. We build good primitives in the first place so they're not highly customized to us, and then a lot of the legwork is just filling in the gaps." — Toby Peterson, centrexIT

For any MSP deciding whether to begin, the tools already in hand are enough. centrexIT runs on Rewst and Claude today, and what it built for itself now serves clients — a combination of capability, adoption, and know-how a competitor cannot stand up overnight.

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