Repairs and Maintenance Case Study

Software powers facilities management efficiency

Authorities across Britain are actively moving towards the reality of e-government, perhaps nowhere more urgently than in rurally-focused councils.

Take Powys, for example. Geographically huge – covering 2,000 square miles, a quarter of Wales, its population conversely is sparse, just over 126,000, accounting for a mere 4% of the Principality’s total.
The council’s estate is extensive though – 600 public buildings and 5,000 houses come under Powys County Council’s control.
Construction Procurement and Premises Manager David Bradley has been helping to take forward the council’s commitment to e-government for some years, overseeing a transformation of the management and operational function of the building services and planned maintenance departments.

E-strategy
Working closely with strategic partner ROCC for several years, Bradley has applied Uniclass modular business support software to a range of office and field-based services that embraces elements from initial call-logging by customer services to live interfacing with PDAs that staff carry with them throughout the extensive rural county. “ROCC don’t stand still, they move forward and that’s what we want from a strategic partner. We generate ideas ourselves but need companies that can help us put those ideas into practice for us” explains Bradley. Restructuring of the authority sparked the need for change, Bradley recalls, with several drivers for a systems review coming into focus – the need for direct interface to the county’s financial system, the opportunity to remove paper invoice and payment streams, the requirement for a system capable of adapting to larger schemes and projects involving multiple contractors and orders, and the need to improve maintenance management by including service contracts and planned maintenance.

Mobile working
Mobile working has been an important aspect of the evolution into
e-government, Bradley explains. “Facilities management teams operate in various locations across the county and comprise surveyors, electrical and mechanical engineers and a multidisciplinary trade’s force”.

“Facility managers provide service to all public buildings in their catchment area,” notes Bradley, “and are the frontline for reactive and programmed building maintenance. The 13 catchment areas network to provide complementary technical and trade skills, forming a self-sufficient cluster.”
Powys stretches 110 miles north to south, with no motorways to help shorten travel times. It can take two and a half hours to drive that distance – “three hours on a bad day”. Operatives can be up to 40 to 50 miles from base. “Coming back to collect paperwork for a job did not represent efficient use of time,” Bradley comments.

But that’s become a thing of the past since the introduction of hand-held PDAs, he goes on. Facilities managers out in the field use these customised i-packs, which act as a browser, allowing them to view jobs and update their status, modify data, deal with applications and add timesheet information online.

“The PDAs make tasks such as paper orders, signing tickets and paper timesheets redundant,” Bradley states, “and there’s no need to travel to base to pick up paperwork. It’s a live environment now.”

Mobile Working - Benefits
The move towards `seamless` data communication is seen most dramatically perhaps by the council’s team of operatives, who are spared the chore of unnecessary travelling on a paper chase and who can see at a glance, the jobs for the day as the Uniclass software generates a job ticket electronically.

System Administrator for ROCC at Powys, John Jones, has been managing projects with ROCC since 1998. “We are rolling out PDAs for operators on the Housing side at the moment,” Jones confirms. “They are in a live system, 24/7. Every time they use the PDA, the information feeds through on to the database. If someone phones the call centre, the information inputted is live and immediately available on the PDA.”

Powys is still working with a leading mobile phone provider to ensure that PDAs can pick up information such as job details, health and safety information, priority allocation, and addresses, in what are currently signal dead zones.

Jones adds: “There are very few black spots left in the county.”

Building services and planned maintenance
Powys has worked with ROCC since the late 1990s, developing further applications for the Uniclass software as previous ones proved their worth.
“We already dealt with ROCC for electronic payment transactions for the traditional Council contractor/operative functions but there was no electronic interface for external contractor payments for responsive maintenance and major projects,” Bradley explains. We needed a front-end maintenance management system that logged calls, processed and monitored jobs, developed a property database, took away the paperwork and provided live links to those out in the field. We started with a clean sheet of paper and called in ROCC again.”
From the collaboration ROCC developed a responsive maintenance software module based on Uniclass.

“We transferred to Microsoft.Net platform – developing the look and sophistication of the Internet screens to allow both technical and administrative staff to use the software anywhere in the County” Bradley says.

Web-based systems
“We wanted a web-based system to cover all of buildings maintenance and the call centre,” Jones recalls, “with a sufficiently flexible software programme and database.”

Working closely with ROCC helped ensure the project brought results. “We need companies that move forward and that can help us put our ideas into practice as well as generate their own solutions,” Jones maintains.

Nicola Brown, ROCC senior account manager, fills in more detail. “Powys had been running Uniclass – a contract management system that enabled users to see calls history and by 2001 had introduced call logging for their facilities managers.

“The system previously managed jobs but could not see what work had been done. There was no snapshot possible of historic and planned work. It was an age-old problem. The system was not property database centric,” Brown says.
“There was a need for attribute data and the software system allows the council to build up a list,” Brown notes, that can be coded against the inventory of items in, for example, a school.

“David Bradley has taken the software and tailored it to define assets that require planned servicing throughout the year with the minimum amount of data entry being required.

Intelligent contact centre
At the front end, claims and helpdesk officer Grace Hodges and her five-strong team work 8.30am to 5pm Monday to Friday logging calls. “We cover any public building “from a toilet to the whole of county hall”, Hodges explains. “It’s general remedial work rather than projects. We may be called up about a heating supply problem in say the video conferencing room and asked to attend to it.

“The front end system guides you through and encourages you to ask the right questions and also gives each job a priority level for actioning. There’s less risk of error now.

“Every property has a four-figure property code that allows us to look up all previous work – what’s been done and what’s outstanding.
“We are an experienced and knowledgeable group of staff,” states Hodges, “the software allows the team to log then monitor jobs on the system and allocate appointments. The facilities manager knows that I have created the job and they can view the status history online. We all have a user ID too, so they can come back to me if they need to.”

Hodges started working for Powys in 1999 so is also a longstanding user of ROCC software who has seen the authority build up its involvement with Uniclass.

Job assignments
“In terms of assigning jobs, the system allows us to see which facilities manager is responsible for the area in question (they have four covering the county) and records their phone number. There is also an external contractors list on the system so that jobs can be assigned.”

The software also assumes responsibility for prioritising jobs. “It automatically gives a priority for the job by selecting the right criteria, whether it is an emergency (within four hours or within 24 hours) then between one and seven days, two to 24 days or within a month.

Also logged on the system will be a history of previous jobs. “We find out who did the job originally, whether a facilities manager issued an order on it and whether the client gave us an order number for it.”

The sequence of five notice windows that the software serves up for helpdesk staff allows them to log fault descriptions, ending with a free text facility for adding more information if necessary such as, in the case of property, who the keyholder is and how staff can gain access. “We can see exactly what the job number, priority and status is. The system is helpdesk-friendly that way,” says Hodges.

Saving time
Time management gains are potentially huge, Hodges is quick to point out, not only because of the geographical scale of Powys but also due to the often long distances that staff may have to walk indoors. “In a building the size of county hall for example, an operative could take 20 minutes to find the door that has a broken hinge on it. Via the information on the system, an operative can locate quickly and exactly where the problem is.”

Since 2002, the team has grown from two to five and plans are afoot to further expand the contact centre, Hodges reports - with good reason it seems as in one four-day period recently, the helpdesk took between 1,300 and1,400 calls. “Not every one of those required a job,” Hodges explains, “but we are working with a consultant to determine what resources we might require.”

Moving forward
Other rurally-based local authorities are eagerly viewing developments in Powys and the expectation is that some may well move along similar lines.
“We are reasonably ahead with e-government,” Bradley says. The partnership with ROCC and the focus on “constant development” is working well, he acknowledges. “We’ve built on ROCC’s expertise, now we’re moving on again with a constant vision of improving on paper systems - grabbing at the technology and evolving it.”

The intention is to enable contractors to receive payment via “purchase cards”.

“And once fully armed with PDAs, engineers will be in a position to collect data on public buildings and so help create a ROCC “asset file” which will be uploaded on to the software”, Bradley explains.

“Powys maintains a continuing commitment to efficiencies and savings”, says Bradley, adding that “the authority has many services operating a zero trading account – we exist on the fees we charge”. Using software to develop and run a planned maintenance programme clearly brings even greater operational efficiencies, as well as fostering “a consistently high level of client satisfaction”, he believes.

The Access to Services initiative that Powys are bringing on stream in late summer 2007, will enable customers to ring one number to access all services within the Authority.

One thing is certain, there’ll be plenty of discussion to iron out the optimum way forward. “Our relationship with ROCC is frank and open. We say to them `This is the problem, how can you help us`. As a strategic supplier, it’s a question of them understanding what Powys want then delivering the best value at the best price.”