Schools around the country are nearly out for Summer. It’s no vacation for those in charge of maintaining the schools and facilities though. The planners out there need to keep a watchful eye on their school’s budget, the state of their facility and the personnel tasked with keeping everything in order. There are countless ways a maintenance management system can help schools and the people responsible for their buildings and equipment.
1. Keep Assets Running
A recent study estimated that the ROI from using proper preventive maintenance procedures versus purely reaction maintenance is 545%. Taking the time to sit down and map out exactly when you need to service your equipment and what inspections need to happen are critical. Tracking all that with a pen and paper or even a few Excel docs can be a nightmare.
A computerized maintenance management system or CMMS can keep track of that data for you. So after scheduling and inputting the information, your work orders for the chiller or the generator will pop up automatically.
2. Manage Supplies
Tons of items flow into a school every year, from air filters to overhead projector light bulbs. There are several benefits of tracking supplies and parts with a CMMS.
First, tracking usage with a CMMS makes it easy to see when you are coming close to running out of parts. Alerts can even be setup to notify you. Second, reports can be run based on part data. This information might be helpful in determining if there is a specific building that is using more parts than others. Knowing that will let you investigate the issue and solve. Furthermore, a maintenance management system can be used to generate purchase orders for parts, saving time.
3. Track Labor
The old proverb goes “it takes a village to raise a child.” Well, it takes near a village of labor to manage a large school or facility. There is not only the full time maintenance and custodial staff, but also outside vendors who assist with projects.
A maintenance management system can make sure that their time is accounted for. Knowing where the hours are spent in a work day can make employees accountable and keep your priorities in-line. With maintenance software, you can also associate hours with work orders and inspections and know who fixed what.
4. Keep Everyone Happy
A school can be thought of a symphony of teachers, parents, students and paraprofessionals. A broken A/C unit or dirty bathroom can turn that symphony’s sweet music sour.
Preventive maintenance can stop some of those problems from occurring, but on-demand or emergency work orders are bound to occur. In this case, responding to issues in a timely manner is key to keeping everyone happy. Setting up an online work order request system allows anyone in the school to submit a work request, monitor the request and even rate how the request was resolved.
5. Save Maintenance Time
The largest campus by size in the world is Berry College in Georgia. The campus at Berry measure 27,000 acres! Imagine how long it would take to drive your Polaris across, much less walk.
Accessing your CMMS from the field with a smartphone or tablet can save time and increase accuracy of data. With mobile maintenance software, your maintenance tech will no longer have to go back to the office to either pick up hard copy work orders or update their desktop-based system.
Take Action Today
To quickly get your school on the path towards better maintenance with our industry leading CMMS software, please either sign up for a free trial or book a demo with one of our software experts today. We will listen to your goals and needs and develop a plan of action to help achieve the best possible results for your school!