“Things are a lot better already. Our inventory is not quite 100 percent accurate yet, but we’re working toward that. We’re also keeping track of what technicians are doing, when they are doing it, and how long they’re taking.”
“It lacked a whole host of features, had a thick client on the desktop, and was not web-based. We also had to retire the infrastructure that it was running on. We couldn’t support the server equipment anymore."
“Even though I’m behind the scenes, the work I do helps the kids who come here have an awesome camp experience in the summer.”
“We effectively had no inventory control program at the time. Some plants would manage things manually on Excel, but that relied upon individuals taking the time to stop what they were doing to go back to the office and update a spreadsheet somewhere, which rarely occurred. Most of the time we were flying blind and depended on tribal knowledge to know what we had in the plant.”
“I thought, ‘I can’t manage like this, there is too much of a load here. As the administrator, I have to stay on top of things, and I can’t rely on a paper trail. Otherwise, every time I have to find some information, I need to go through piles of paperwork. It’s just not reliable. People leave, and others forget. In our situation, one failure on one piece of equipment may mean residents don’t get water.”
“Our biggest bottlenecks happened on those days when a bunch of stuff went wrong at the same time. If we have five things break at the same time and three maintenance technicians available but only two know how to fix certain problems, where do we start? We had no kind of system to manage those situations.”
“The main pain point with our old system was the lack of a consolidated place that brought all our information together. We had no location where everyone could get updates on maintenance cases, photos or other data. We had limited access; managers only had hard copies of older reports at each location. We wanted a solution that allowed everyone to see what was going on with all maintenance cases in real time, at any location.”
“I love it. It’s a lot easier to manage, especially with the mobile app. Todd and I both have it downloaded on our phones so we can easily see when people create maintenance cases, update information, or close them out.”
“They were using far too much paper. My client was essentially using a rudimentary logbook. It was like a basic spreadsheet that could capture a date, a room, and a general category like “Maintenance”. There was no way to aggregate or analyze the data, and you couldn’t see which issues were being closed or opened or analyze its history for any trend analysis. That meant maintenance decisions were nearly always made on an anecdotal basis, leading to minor “noisy” problems to dominate focus and supersede more serious fundamental issues that weren’t so distracting but impacted operations more broadly.”
“UpKeep has allowed us to examine the facilities management business in the aggregate, pull out trends that previously we couldn’t see, and work smarter and faster for our clients, while also lowering their costs over the longer term. It has fundamentally changed how the hotels, bars and other properties are being looked after. Less than a year into UpKeep's roll out across the business, nobody could imagine ever going back to the old ways.”
“Before I joined, the plant was a very, very small operation. It’s just kind of been ballooning the past few years and there wasn’t anybody at the helm who knew about best practices for maintenance or reliability. As a result, we have been building from the ground up.”
“We were missing a lot of tickets because of the way that system was set up. We’d have to go search for that ticket. Time is money in our business. Every hour that a machine is down costs us $3,500. That works out to about $1 each second."
“We quickly eliminated any solutions that had super-crowded screen shots. Those would remind us too much of our older software that we wanted to replace. We really needed to make sure that the new solution had the work order features we wanted, could take pictures, and allowed mobile integration.”
“It was more of a task-based project management system that really had nothing to do with facilities, maintenance or inventory-control. I needed something a little more in-depth, something that was more than a digital checklist.”
“Whether we were using the desktop or the mobile version of our old system, it was really slow. Setting up the system was difficult with many steps. It would take us so long to raise a preventive or reactive maintenance task, and it was costly.”