Why does the housing sector continue to expose itself to unnecessary risk and inefficiencies by using spreadsheets to manage planned work? While there is widespread adoption of new technologies to support housing maintenance and repairs, it’s staggering to see that Excel is still being used to manage and monitor complex planned, cyclical and programmed works.
It makes sense to leverage the power of cloud-based field service software to reduce the administrative burden and compliance risks of managing employees, resources, subcontractors, client reporting and citizen engagement using a patchwork quilt of homegrown spreadsheets.
That’s why we have partnered with leading construction, development and property services companies to create an innovative SaaS solution that goes beyond repairs to optimise the management of planned and programmed maintenance.
A single view
Compliance is the principal concern when faced with a fragmented maintenance system. Spreadsheets are not secure, often out of date and prone to undetected errors, and when it comes to the safety and wellbeing of your tenants and employees, this simply isn’t good enough. Organisations need a reliable and secure ‘single source of truth’ to maintain compliance – providing a real-time view over all proactive maintenance information sits at the heart of our solution.
Information accuracy – a central live database of all property maintenance and adaptation history, records and evidence means you can track progress, maintain compliance and identify and resolve potential issues quickly.
Locked-in compliance – mandatory workflows and task-level prompts reduce the risk of individual or subcontractor errors, provide a clear audit trail and ensure new regulatory requirements are more easily embedded in your day-to-day processes.
Enhanced decision making – maintaining a consistent, centralised view enables all aspects of individual, team and organisation-wide planned maintenance performance to be tracked, meaning managers can identify required actions, spot patterns and look for opportunities to improve productivity and service levels.
Improved processes
Housing repairs have already been transformed by technology that streamlines processes, drastically reduces repetitive tasks and makes information sharing and communications much easier. It makes sense then to unlock these same benefits in planned and programmed works such as preventative maintenance and capital improvement.
Our new system delivers significant benefits across:
- Information capture – highly usable mobile case management tools eliminate the risk and frustration of recording stock status and other data in the field and can feed consistent information back to a single unified system spanning planned and responsive work.
- Back office and front-line administration – automated processes, simple capture forms, case management tools and machine learning all help to streamline the administration associated with booking appointments, time recording, material usage, stock management, invoicing, processing building supply merchant orders and managing sub-contractors.
- Pan-stakeholder management – shared visibility, consistent reporting and communication and collaboration tools help to break down team silos, manage sub-contractors and engage with clients and tenants via user-friendly, self-service portals.
What now?
The introduction of cloud-based field service software for planned work should be somewhere near the top of your transformation agenda. Those who continue to ‘get by’ delivering major works using an inadequate mixture of systems, spreadsheets and paper will soon find themselves at a significant disadvantage. For those willing to make the move now, they’ll find our cloud-based technology will quickly deliver a step-change in productivity, efficiency, service levels and compliance.
Nick Jeffreys is the managing director for housing, property and facilities management at Totalmobile.
