Are You Needlessly Consuming Your Valuable Time and Money?

One major university has calculated that it takes six hours to complete the average work order with two of those hours searching for information regarding its completion.  The NIST has indicated that, “…the total costs to facility stake holders due to inadequate interoperability and communications to be $15.84 billion (2.84% of operating costs) annually for U.S. facilities…”.  And common knowledge is that at least twenty-five percent of all facilities management time is spent gathering information to accomplish the task…in the end, it is all your time and money.

We already know why the information you need to manage your facility becomes old before you actually need it.  Now we can begin to discuss the benefits of accessing your information if you had it.

I will use information from an institution has told me that they have about 40 work order requests per day.  Using some o f the parameters above, that is about 30 workdays of effort to complete them.  Also using the same parameters, about 10 workdays or 80 work-hours are consumed searching for information to complete these tasks.

Many of these same institutions have told us that the time it takes to get the maintenance personnel to the work site just to find out that they took the wrong part or did not have the proper tool for the work order with them is a large contributor to their overall time and cost.  The 15 minutes back to the shop and 15 minutes back to the work site begins to add up.  They report that mostly this is caused by the inaccessibility to the right information.

Portable information, accessible information, organized information and updateable information all seem to lend themselves to the needs of the maintenance worker.  Being able to access this treasure-trove of data at the shop and at the work site will save a significant portion of the time that is calculated to be consumed for each work order.

A well-organized dataset, that an average technician has the IT capability to access, that provides simple markup tools to update that dataset without the need of a powerful desktop PC or years of training, is what technicians need to be more efficient and reduce the time and cost to complete work orders.

Imagine if you could reduce the time it takes to search for information by about 50% (that would be one hour instead of 2), you would be able to complete 8 more work orders or, in a better scenario, you could have reduces your staff by 5 technicians, electricians , or carpenters over time saving a significant amount of money annually.  It is your time and money, how are you spending it?