Learn how a CMMS can help manage the very specific needs of maintenance in the hospitality industry.
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Webinar Transcription
Good afternoon or good morning depending where you’re located. Thank you for joining us for today’s webinar. As you see on your screen, today we’re going to be discussing how a CMMS helps the hospitality and casinos industry. As we go through this, keep an open mind. You may have certain processes and policies that you may follow. Our system is very flexible in the sense of being able to accommodate different workloads depending on what your organization requires.
About MicroMain. We are headquartered in Austin, Texas. We’ve been providing hospitality facilities with our application and software for 23 years. In fact, we celebrated our 23rd anniversary in February. In addition to maintenance management software, we also offer facility management software and services.
You may recognize the folks who are currently utilizing MicroMain solutions. As you can see from the top, we do have over 3,700 customers worldwide.
Here’s a question for you. Check on one of the items and click “submit” to let us know what you’re currently utilizing today for your maintenance process.
For CMMS in hospitality and casinos, we understand you have some very unique needs – making sure the facility is up to where it needs to be for your best customer experience, of course related to preventive maintenance, you want to be able to prevent any asset failures that may affect your customers as well, and of course, managing your corrective on-demand work orders, so that whenever an issue arises, you’ll be able to do repairs.
What can someone in your role get out of a CMMS system? First, of course, is that you could maximize your apps and availability and extend equipment life. It’s very key, being able to know what is the useful life for your equipment and have you perform the maintenance effectively to maybe prolong that life. Manage your labor, whether it’s your own staff or even third-party contractors that are coming on site to do the work. Be able to project budgets accurately. Manage parts inventory. Parts inventory is part of the MicroMain solution that’s built right in, being able to store all of your parts, whether they are consumables or parts that may be necessary to manage. Certain pieces of equipment don’t ever go out of service, so to say. Being able to maintain inventories that come standard with the application. A lot of ability and capabilities there to get the data that you need. With that, being able to make those decisions and provide others within your organization with the information they need to make business-related decisions.
Of course around work orders. As you know, there are different apps. Components do come into play. Not to say that all five leads would necessarily come into play, but there is the option where they all would or I’m sure there are scenarios where all five of these options would come into play – your assets, your parts, your labor, if you’re doing any inspections and/or you’re providing these kind of documents. Maybe it’s a sense of an instructional guide for the technicians who are doing the work.
Are you currently performing P.M.s today? I imagine most folks are. It’s pretty commonplace now. One thing nice with MicroMain is when you’re looking to do an asset, if you’re ever concerned or want to make sure that you have that asset on a P.M., it’s readily available to see within that assets profile if you have any tasks correlated with that asset.
How do I keep equipment working? Of course P.M. is a big way – developing your procedures or following manufacturer guidelines, scheduling the work orders. In MicroMain, where P.M.s are scheduled is under a feature called “tasks”. It’s not just P.M.s. Maybe there’re other things that you want to schedule – scheduling inspections or meter readings or routine maintenance – utilizing it for other reminders.
For example, maybe as a reminder that the fire extinguishers need to be serviced, create standard corrective action work orders with instructions for correcting inspection point failures and be able to pull reports again. Maybe there are assets that are getting close to their end of life or maybe you need to, based on reviewing information on your P.M.s or even the number of on-demand work orders that may be occurring, does your schedule need to change? Does it need to maybe shorten the cycle or the frequency or maybe lengthen the frequency as to how often you’re repairing certain pieces of equipment? Of course, being able to manage contracts and warranties which are assets.
On-demand work orders. How could we improve on these? We do have a feature called “work request”. It allows for the non-maintenance folks, other employees, some of our customers even open it up to outside folks, constituents, or maybe in your case, maybe allowing the hotel guests to be able to submit a request logging in as a guest.
The key thing with it… several things. One, it reduces incoming phone calls, orders, requests. The downside of that is it really doesn’t create any kind of tracking mechanism. Having a work request module does. The details are captured when the requestor submits her online form. Email notifications are automatically sent upon submission as well, and you can determine who gets that. When the work is done, an email is sent back to that requestor to let them know the work has been completed.
While the work order is still open, the requestor can check the status and of course it allows for departmental communication. The big thing is really increase that tracking. You really eliminate or get very close to eliminating any work orders that may fall within the cracks, so to say. Maybe you forgot that somebody passing said, “This needs to be fixed.” This worker request module allows for that.
Would handheld mobile devices help you to improve maintenance performance and manage workflow in your facility? This is the ability to manage work orders via a smartphone or a tablet. Very much. We’ve seen a lot of folks here lately kind of move this direction or somebody state to us that this is the direction in which they want to move. It does a few things. One, you’re able to work orders quickly and instantly out to technicians via mobile phones. They don’t have to rely on a piece of paper or going back to the main office to get the paperwork order. They can pick them out on the field. They can record meter readings, document expectation points at parts. They can modify and close those work orders, including adding their time.
The key item there as well is, again, from a few different things. One, it’s the speed as to how quickly you can get these work orders to the technicians. The technicians have everything they need right at their fingertips on a mobile device.
Our mobile functionality is not device-specific. If you have a green initiative, you can eliminate paperwork that’s flowing around as well as even eliminate the need to store hardcopy paper work orders.
Managing inventory and parts. As mentioned earlier, the parts inventory piece is part of the application. It’s not an additional module. You can manage your inventories. You can generate parts inventory control reports. There are filters for cycle counting and full inventories to help filter your cycle counts and inventories.
Of course, you can reduce inventory carrying cost by analyzing parts. What are your active parts? What are you minimum inventory levels for parts? Do you really need to keep 20 parts for one item? Maybe you can get away with keeping five, so being able to really manage the cost of your inventory levels as well.
How to optimize the process? Analyze the total cost of maintenance first – labor parts, assets parts, labor costs and assets – being able to see what kind of costs are we incurring working on all the equipment in floor one or floor two or in building, and what kind of cost does that look like to us as a maintenance department. With that information, you’re tracking your preventive maintenance. Is your current plan effective?
Of course with MicroMain, everything that you’re working is an asset – be it an area asset or equipment asset. With those kinds of assets, you have the ability to look at full history. What P.M.s have we done to these assets or what on-demand work orders or a combination of the two? What kind of cost does that look like? If it’s equipment, is it nearing its end of life? Is it causing us more to continue to work on this piece of equipment vs. buying a new piece of equipment?
In today’s role for you, what is your primary concern? Response to corrective maintenance and preventive maintenance. Those are key. How quickly are we getting things done? Reports that let you know work orders in general or your P.M.s or your on-demand work orders, how quickly are we managing those requests? Are we maximizing our P.M.s that we’re working on?
Efficient maintenance process, keeping full history and details of all your assets. Being able to provide equipment uptime, which again affects your clienteles, your facilities, and helps save you money – reducing maintenance cost, reduce downtime, increase your labor efficiency and better manage your parts inventory. All that is part of the application.
What we’re going to do right now is actually get into a little bit of the application as well, show you some of the key items that we discussed during today’s slideshow. All right, so one of the items that we talked about was a work request feature which allows for other employees as well as even your hotel guests or casino guests, if you want it to allow them to submit a work request. If it’s other employees, they could log in. They may have a profile that they have to find. This can allow for guest log-in. You can configure the log-in screen how you wish. If you don’t ever have any of your guest log-in, you can even make this button disappear.
Just kind of show the workflow of this. We know who the requestor is. As we get into work location and work details, they can provide the key information that’s needed. If you notice property asset and service are in bold print. If they try to submit this item without one of those fields filled in, they’ll get in an error. It’s not even optional. Maybe it’s grayed out or maybe it’s even invisible. He doesn’t even see that it’s here. You have a lot of different ways to configure the screen.
Once a user submits an item, they can go pick and choose what is the asset, what is the service, what is the issue. The description field is very long. They can write a book to you if they really wanted to. Click “submit”. They get a green confirmation bar. They can click here to view the status of their request, so they can see their request. Once they click “submit,” they can no longer make any edits but there is the option to allow for a notes field. Maybe they want to ask some information to their request. You could see here the status. Right now it’s in requested status. As this work order is issued and completed, they’ll see the status change as well.
Upon submission, there is an email that is generated and sent to whomever you decide, whether it’s a single person or multiple folks that are on the distribution, that get the notification that a new request has been submitted.
Getting to the application itself, so here we have MicroMain. It is a Microsoft Access front-end, SQL database backend solution. Maneuvering through the frontend is going to be very similar to maneuvering through Outlook, Word, Excel – active work orders, assigned work orders, P.M. work orders as well.
Going to the work orders, here’s the one we just submitted. George is my submitter. He gave me a description. Here’s the issue. This is tied to the service that is selected. We have an asset selected here. This happens to be a parent asset. The parent could be an area asset or it could be a larger piece of equipment that has smaller components. When a parent asset is listed, you can click on this to see what the child assets are. Maybe we have an air handler issue for example. We want any kind of work that we do associated with that specific equipment.
Moving forward a year from now or two years from now, we’re able to report again, “On May 20, 2014, this occurred and this was the action taken to work on the air handler ’03.”
On this page, using this left-hand column, we have some different items on the bottom right which are controlled by this left-hand column – assignment options, notifications. If any of these items are applied, you can check the appropriate box. This asset is under warranty. It’s pulling from the profile. If we add any documents or inspection points, these would be checked off as well. We have the description. Summary is going to keep track of where your costs are. As we start adding cost elements, this will be populated – where your data is stored, failures are stored. This is your own user-defined list. You can just double-click on any area on the dropdown option to add or edit that list.
I’m going to assign this to one of my technicians. You can assign it to a single technician or multiple. As you can see here, not only do I have my own staff but I have third-party contractors. I can assign it to multiple people, if need be, holding the control button down. I’m going to assign it to Paul. He’s my mobile user. I may not know what parts are needed. I can let Paul decide that.
Any other cost element that may come into play, this is your own user-defined list. We can add inspection points. Maybe I just want to add a couple of these items here. Place to add documents, images, notes. Here is that note from the requestor and I can reply to their note whatever I want to tell them. Hit “save”. If they were to go check on the status, they’ll see my note that has been submitted back to them.
I’m going to go and issue this work order. There is email notification that is turned on as well. Whenever you assign a work order to a technician, if they do receive email, they can get an email notice that a work order has been assigned to them.
As far as capturing the work order on a mobile device, this is a tablet emulator. You can pick up a work order on either a smartphone or a tablet. It’s not device-specific – Android, Apple products, other products – as long as they’re web-enabled.
This technician can see all work orders in the system, but you can control that. If you only want them to see their work orders, you can set up those controls in the application. A work order assigned to this user, you’ll see a little person in the background with their hand raised. If there’s no image there, then this is an unassigned work order. If there’s an image with both hands down, this is assigned but it’s assigned to another technician.
Here’s that work order request. Right now it’s open status. Details, if I need to assign it to a sub-status or a shop. Priority level. If you’re tracking failure, maybe there is a defective part. If you need to track downtime or assign it to an accountant, you can do so. Hit “save”. Here’s the description. I can add to the description. I can add comments. Labor. It’s assigned to me. I can enter my time. I can either click in and click out, put in my start and stop times or maybe even just put total hours. You have some different options here. If any of the technicians join me, I can even add another technician to this work order.
Parts. Currently there aren’t any parts assigned. I want to add parts. There is an ability that if you use a barcode to scan a part to add to a work order, I can search for a part. Maybe I want to filter parts only associated with the asset. You can create those parts to asset relationships. If I did that and I type in the part I’m looking for, it’s going to pull up the part that match. In my case, I’ve got three different locations. I’m going to grab from this first one and maybe I need to use a couple of parts. Hit “save”. If I need to use additional parts, I can add additional parts, if need be.
Under “More” is where I’ll manage my inspection points. If it’s a metered asset, I can update my meters, add other costs, or add documents and review documents. Maybe here this one passed, I can add a rating or a measurement as well. Hit “save”.
If the second one fails for whatever reason, I have the option to create a corrective work order off of this failed inspection. I don’t have to but I can say, “Yes, I need to create a new work order”. I don’t want to navigate to the new one. I just want to stay on this current one. Create a new one. I could have defined also what the corrective action needs to be. If I go back to my detail, now I can complete this work order. Once it’s completed on my end, although I have visibility to it, I can no longer make any edit to that work order. That work order’s done.
Here is that new and failed inspection point work order that I can now work on, if need be. I go back here, look at my completed work orders as well. Here is that completed work order or its tracking cost based on time and also based on parts. I worked three hours. I can have it set to automatically calculate cost based on the profile for Paul. The same thing with the parts, automatically calculate cost based on part quantity used. Whenever a part quantity is utilized, the inventory levels are then depleted by the actual quantity used.
Preventive maintenance – we talked about that today – is managed under “tasks” in MicroMain. This can be utilized for your P.M.s. or as reminders – routine maintenance, inspections. We have some reminders and calibrations have to be done. As I mentioned before, maybe you have a reminder that your fire extinguishers need inspecting as well.
Basically how this occurs is you first define what you want done, give it a name and a frequency. This is a monthly item here. Of course if this were quarterly, this would be done. It’s like the monthly option and changes to every three months, for example. You have some scheduling dates down below. One of the frequency items is also meter, whether it’s for example, a very common one we see is maybe it’s every so many hours or so many miles or X time frame as to how often something needs to occur.
“Description,” what do we want done. “Summaries,” again keeping track of cost. “Assets,” you can assign a single asset or multiple assets to a task. You can pre-define who’s going to do the work. You don’t have to but it’s optional as well as what parts may come into play, any other cost, what inspection points may occur.
“Activities” is unique and there are several ways to use it. In my demo side here, we have a monthly task, but I have other things that I want done that don’t happen monthly. For example, this first item happens every two months, this one, every three months and so on. The system knows based on these time frames when to include these activities to the work order. I can add documents, comments. All I have done is just create my task. I’m using my task scheduler. I’ll get them on my schedule just by defining a date sometime in the future, whatever that may be – end of the month, end of the year, the year 2020. It’s your choice. It generates schedule too and look at everything on your task list that you have defined. We have got some meters I need to update here. Put all those on your schedule.
Once they’re all in the schedule, now we’re just waiting on work orders to be created. You have a couple of options in MicroMain. You can either do it manually or you can have the system automatically create these work orders for you as they’re coming due. Once they’re created, they then reside on your work orders list. In requested status, whatever type you’ve called them. If you’re using mobile, these could be distributed out to your technicians on mobile. Especially if they’re already assigned to these tasks, they will have gotten an email notice letting them know that a new work order in requested status is assigned to you. You can close them out on mobile device or you can close them out if you’re on the main application as well. As mentioned during our slideshow parts inventory, you can maintain all your parts. If you have multiple storage locations, you can track all those items, keep track of your suppliers.
The order screen lets you know, “What are my order unit quantities and costs?” You can also define your minimum inventory levels and even have an alert set up whenever you have parts that have fallen below those levels. As mentioned, whenever you do utilize a part on a work order, your inventory on-hand amount will shrink by the parts used.
Here is where you also can keep track and maintain all your staff. Third-party contractors keep track of their shifts, keep track of their schedule within the application. Maybe you have different staff members that work different shifts. You can keep track of those as well. On the “Action” tab, there is a way to keep track of those schedules and how many work order is assigned to him each day.
Of course, one thing we talked about is reporting. There are over 600 reports available on the application. We break them out into different groups. For example, reports specifically to assets, depreciation, downtime, replacement projection. Maybe you want to run a report to see what’s coming due in 2016 that needs to be replaced. You’re not blindsided by these capital expenditures at the start of the year.
“Work orders,” being able to see average time to complete work orders, being able to get cost information. Maybe you want a cost summary you’ve done in a certain building or to a certain asset group, you can define your dates as well. I’m just going to go and run this. You have different options. I can print this report, do a preview of it or export it to Excel. I’ve got my filtering on top – completed work order, cost summary, and it breaks it up by labor parts and other. It gives me my totals as well for each of these work orders. I’ve got several pages here. If I go to the very end, I do get my grand total as well. Whether I filtered this by a building, by a specific asset, group of assets, it will still break out the cost for me. If you are managing your own parts inventory, there are inventory-specific reports that you can run inventory usage. How often are we using an item? “Inventory on hand,” maybe you want to know what is in my inventory, am I storing too much, what is my dollar value. You can see the different parts where it’s stored to quantities and the value of your inventory as well.
Again a lot of reports. Some reports are a graphical representation – pie graph, bar graph, line graph. “Labels”. If you want to be able to create your own barcode, “labels” at MircoMain, you can do so by taking the appropriate size. “Batch reports” allows you to create as many batches, if need be. Maybe you have certain reports that you run daily, weekly or monthly. You can create as many batches as you need to, associate the right reports with that batch as you’re filtering. By the way, with filtering, we have standard filtering and advanced. Standard utilizes an “and” statement as you add additional items. Advanced allows you to create your “and/or” statement.
If there’s one you’re going to use pretty regularly, you can even save it and it will be down below in your saved filter list. You would just apply those, if need be. “Select your action”. The system will automatically generate all those reports in your batch for you as well.
Any questions? Not a problem. Again as you see on the screen, you can chat your questions now or you can always send a question to info@micromain.com or give us a call. Happy to work with you. The appropriate account manager assigned to your region or your state will work with you and also provide a much more in-depth product demonstration as necessary, but I do want to thank you for your time today. We’re here to help. We’re here to assist you as you’re looking into MicroMain. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.