Schools and districts work hard to keep their facilities up to date, but the necessary financial and human resources aren’t always available. Creating and maintaining 21st-century buildings for today’s students doesn’t come cheap. And school maintenance rarely gets priority treatment from legislators or state education departments.
Often, taxpayers can’t see the immediate value of improving energy efficiency or repairing outdated facilities. Some buildings that look great to passers-by are in fact housing deteriorating plumbing systems, boilers, or flooring. Consequently, school facility budgets rarely match the needs on the ground.
Plus, parents and legislators may not see how integral school facilities are to learning and socialization. Buildings don’t just house educational programs; they actually influence them.
As a result, when it comes to maintenance and operations processes, schools have to make every dollar count. A technology management system can help simplify your district’s maintenance and operations processes, saving you money and improving your processes.
Efficiently manage school facilities and grounds.
Integrated project management software can help organize school facility management, provide an accountability tool, and produce reliable reports.
Campus maintenance software doesn’t have to be complicated. It just needs to be smart and functional, driving productivity with a well-placed click. Oh, and it needs to be mobile. Perhaps more than any other sector in the school, facility managers and maintenance teams rely on mobile technology.
With that in mind, what does a campus maintenance management system provide?
A technology-based system can let your team:
- Create preventive and predictive maintenance schedules to reduce downtime and improve reliability.
- Generate new task lists or work orders in minutes from anywhere on campus.
- Create an inspection check-off list that you can update in real-time.
- Keep track of inventory. You can receive automatic notifications when products are running low, triggering you to reorder parts and supplies.
- Fashion work orders automatically.
- Produce custom reports that help you save time and money on future projects.
In the past, maintenance and asset management software was bulky, time-consuming, and a pesky problem to be solved. Modern campus maintenance management systems, however, operate in the cloud so your team members can log in using a browser on their desktop, tablet, or phone.
Easily track tasks and work orders for schools.
Work orders serve as a contract between the customer (in this case, you) and the contractor. When communicating within the organization, you can use an internal work order or a task management system produced in the same system.
Work orders create a paper trail that defines the task, the deadline, and the price of a project. They typically incorporate a job description, contact information, a list of required materials, and an estimated cost for each line item. Some organizations use work orders as invoices for finished projects.
In general, work order management follows three steps:
- Create a new work order.
- Move the work order through the organization.
- Close the completed work order.
People involved with the work order include the person who initiated it, the manager(s) who approved it and the people who carried it out. The keys to good work order management are good communication and solid tracking. Technology can help do both well.
Work order management software streamlines inventory, maintenance, and operations processes across a school or other organization.
An integrated management system offers several benefits to work order tracking.
First, it helps anticipate potential problems. Users can save money, reduce frustration, and make orderly repairs. Second, it uses stored data to provide business intelligence. Smart dashboards and reports can reveal inefficiencies over time. Finally, a work order management software decreases the tedious tasks and manual updates that a paper system requires.
Plan preventive and predictive maintenance.
You can reduce failures and improve the longevity of your assets through preventive and predictive maintenance. Although preventive and predictive maintenance are both a type of scheduled maintenance, they are not the same things.
Here’s the difference:
Preventive maintenance — Technicians perform tests on assets while everything is still running smoothly. The goal is to prevent asset failure and extend the life of the equipment. Preventive maintenance requires very little investment and can save companies 12-18% according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Predictive maintenance — Technicians test equipment that has started to perform abnormally. The goal is to discover a breakdown early in order to schedule repairs at a time that will not disrupt workflow. Predictive maintenance can be expensive but also saves companies 25-30%.
An integrated campus management system can help schedule both types of maintenance. For preventive maintenance, you can plan activities, send alerts to technicians, and get a real-time report when the test is through.
Although less important for schools than for other industries, predictive maintenance is still vital to efficient operations. IoT sensors on smart assets can collect data and transmit it to the management system, triggering predictive maintenance when needed.
Use data insights to extend the life of valuable assets.
No matter how well maintained it is, equipment is going to depreciate with time and use. For many school and district maintenance leaders, nursing along with aging equipment for “one more year” seems like priority number one. That said, data can help prolong the life of your organization’s assets.
True, big data is a buzzword right now but for good reason. As a school maintenance and operations director, you can use the data you collect from a project to analyze downtime, failures, costs, and other statistics. Using this analysis, your team can determine your priority assets as well as assign a high-risk tag to assets that need urgent attention.
You’ll also be able to track your equipment’s downtime and assess performance management. Finally, a maintenance tracking system can let you identify the optimal retirement age for your assets. By looking at your system’s data on performance and expenditure, you can determine how to keep some assets operating beyond their financial life.
Integrated, cloud-based school management systems can help simplify your district’s maintenance and operations processes. And they don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Modern technology relies on a secure cloud and is easy for team members to learn and use. Contact One to One to learn more about our integrated K-12 technology management solution.
