Maintenance at Holy Cross College

Holy Cross College is a small Catholic college in northern Indiana. With approximately 500 students to support and eleven buildings to maintain, the Facility Services department has a varied work-load that requires them to respond to many types of maintenance needs. For the past five years, they’ve used MainBoss Basic maintenance management software to help them stay on top of their work.

The department uses MainBoss to manage work orders, including the automatic scheduling of preventive maintenance. They also use MainBoss to track some of their inventory of spare parts and other maintenance materials.

But one of the most important functions of MainBoss is to keep track of work requests—reports of problems that require attention. Requests may come in from a variety of sources: secretaries in academic departments, representatives in the dormitories, college staff (e.g. in food services), and even Holy Cross’s vice presidents. Not only does the maintenance department have to make sure that problems don’t fall between the cracks, but once a problem has been addressed, the maintenance department wants to make sure that people are satisfied with the work.

For Holy Cross College, the solution is MainBoss @Requests, an optional software module that allows authorized users to submit requests by email. @Requests automatically sends email to the submitter when the message is received, and at various other points in the work process. In particular, @Requests automatically informs the submitter when the Facility Services department marks the job as finished. Not only does this keep the submitter “in the loop” without requiring any effort from maintenance personnel, it also serves as a check to make sure the work was satisfactory. If a submitter is told, “The job is done,” but there are still loose ends, the submitter can contact Facility Services again. Quick feedback means that no one is left hanging wondering if there’s more to come.

@Requests has been so successful at Holy Cross that 80-90% of all work requests are now submitted by email. This makes the maintenance department happy—email messages provide a much better “paper trail” than calls taken over the phone. With email, Facility Services has a clear record of communications between their department and the rest of the college; there’s no confusion about who said what.

In fact, email has become the “default” for how Facility Services does business: they now use a special marking to flag phoned-in requests, showing that those may need special attention. Phoned-in requests can’t be handled automatically by @Requests, so they take extra work from maintenance personnel. The more that personnel can work by email instead of phone, the more time they have for other duties. In fact, phone calls have been reduced so much that the department has been able to switch one worker from full-time office duties to part-time office/part-time custodian.

This is just an example of how Facilities Services has used MainBoss to keep expenses under control while continuing to provide high-quality work. As every maintenance worker knows, the right tool makes the job a whole lot easier.