The Old Process
Like many care homes, our old process was 100% paper-based. We placed maintenance books at each facility, typically held at the nurses' stations or reception desks. We designed and printed spreadsheets ourselves to suit our needs.
The care home staff would write any maintenance issues as they saw them in the closest maintenance logbook. The maintenance technician would review the books twice daily and address the issues as needed. We also used Excel to track our preventive maintenance schedules.
The biggest challenge with the old process was poor visibility and accountability. It was sometimes challenging to show how productive each technician was, how many repairs they completed daily, how big each job was, how long it took, how much it cost, and who did it. We could not see the breakdown/preventative maintenance ratio, not to mention KPI's.
To complicate matters further, we risked losing pages from the maintenance book or books entirely, as loose pages can be easily misplaced. Some of the floor staff and maintenance technician signatures were hard to decipher; in some cases, we could not tell who signed off the completed job.
In addition, HSE, EHO, and HIQA are raising the bar, and standard paper-based files will be obsolete.
In early 2022, we decided we needed to manage our facilities maintenance better, and for this, we laid out four main objectives:
- Gain better visibility across our care facilities—we wanted to know the types of breakdowns, time spent on repairs, response times, split between preventive and reactive maintenance, etc. We want one centralized system so the Manager has a real-time overview across multiple sites.
- Increase accountability and transparency across the maintenance team
- Automate the maintenance process
- Track it all in one modern maintenance system
“Overall, the process went very smoothly. Once the end users used the system, they quickly realized it would make their lives easier.”
Choosing a system that worked for us
When searching for the right technology, we knew we were looking for something particular. It had to offer the features and functions we needed, be simple and intuitive to use, and be easier for the administrators, nurses, and help staff to report issues in each facility. We wanted to be able to dig into work orders quickly, view the different types of maintenance, and understand the repair steps.
We wanted something to transform maintenance at our residential nursing home facilities. Zoidii was the answer. Some of the other systems we looked at were overly complicated and had functions and features we didn't need, whereas Zoidii was extremely user-friendly and would work well for the Grace Healthcare use case.
We assigned a care home administrator, let's call her "Judy" at one of our facilities as the CMMS champion. Judy went through all the Zoidii CMMS training before we started gathering the data. She compiled the asset lists for each site, which Zoidii imported quickly into the CMMS.
Adopting new technology can be met with resistance, so Judy was present for go-live at each location. We also brought Zoidii onsite to conduct in-person training to ensure everyone felt comfortable with the system. Overall, the process went very smoothly.
Once the end users used the system, they quickly realized it would make their lives easier.
“Our favorite feature is the guest work request portal. It's four fields and takes seconds to complete.”
Since adopting Zoidii, we can see numerous improvements across the group:
- We are more efficient. We capture everything maintenance-related in Zoidii, so we can quickly pull metrics or data for any facility in seconds for internal review or as requested by EHO, HSE, or HIQA inspectors.
- There is more accountability across the group. We can see exactly who did what and when. Technicians are more responsible for their performance and more committed to the work. Assigned Logins are very helpful in this process.
- From a quality perspective, all work requests from the operations team get logged into the system and completed more quickly than before.
- We can use the CMMS to improve maintenance and positively impact the business across all facilities.
Overall, the team's feedback has been very positive. You don't need a Ph.D. in rocket science to use Zoidii. As we saw during the demos, it is user-friendly, so new users pick it up quickly.
Our favorite feature is the guest work request portal. It's four fields and takes seconds to complete. We hired a new chef for one of our facilities, and I showed him how to create a guest work request in less than 60 seconds.
He was beyond impressed by how quickly he could report an issue in his kitchen to the maintenance team. Floor staff love the camera option; they can add a picture to the ticket, making it easier for the maintenance technician to evaluate what he needs to bring with him ahead of attending to the task.
The Future
As part of our ESG policy, our goal is to be 100% paperless. We can see the benefits of going digital: We are more efficient, productive, and organized. The nurses are more confident that maintenance issues they log in Zoidii will be appropriately addressed. Over the next few months, we will implement some newly acquired facilities in Zoidii.
Grace Healthcare is not immune to the current energy crisis, so we are currently evaluating BMS systems for our facilities to help us better manage energy usage. We are working with Zoidii to understand the integration between a BMS system and the CMMS, so we can seamlessly share data between the two systems.
About the Author
Michal Maslanka is the group head of facilities management at Grace Healthcare. Michal heads up a team of technicians that manage reactive and preventive maintenance at Grace Healthcare's care homes.