Community Non-Profit Gets Organized with Hippo CMMS

Challenges

Wayne Metro was struggling to combine features from two different pieces of software, one for work orders and another for forms, but a lot of work was falling through the gaps. Where they could stitch together workflows, the processes were loose and inefficient. Maintenance management requires quick responses and clear communication, but Wayne Metro was failing to get the right work done on time. The lack of streamlined processes left the team frustrated.

But it was more than just problems with workflows. The organization also lacked other basics for asset management, including visibility into their operations. Because everything was spread out across multiple platforms, they couldn’t properly track completion rates and costs. They didn’t know how well they were doing or how much it was costing them.

Solutions

Wayne Metro uses Hippo CMMS to create efficient workflows for everyone, across facilities, even up and down the organizational chart. Now everything is simplified, streamlined, and centralized. “General staff use it to make requests; supervisors use it to make requests and monitor requests in their facilities; technicians use it to direct their work; and facilities leadership use it to manage resources, maintenance, repair and asset tracking across the agency. Users at every level benefit from the ease (of use) and transparency of the process,” explains Paul.

With everyone on board, Wayne Metro sees improvements across the board for a concrete return on investment.

Request portal creates transparency

One of the biggest drawbacks of their old system was how difficult is was for people to submit requests. Even when someone could make a request, they had no way of knowing if there had been any follow-up.

With Hippo, Wayne Metro can easily control access to the submission process, and they’ve decided to open it up to the entire staff. The agency benefits from learning about maintenance issues sooner and more consistently. Just as importantly, Hippo gives everyone on staff a voice, so they know they are valued. “It has democratized the ability to report issues,” explains Paul. “Staff feel as though they are being heard and their needs are being attended to.”

Not only is the portal open, but now a submitter can also track their request. Hippo lets them know both when it’s been approved and completed. Paul says a common example of how his agency leverages this feature is where a school manager submits a request for supplies to be moved from one facility to another. Once a facility lead approves the request, it’s assigned to a tech. Then when the tech closes out the work order, the software doubles back and updates the school manager. The workflow is so helpful it’s become a staff favorite, and it’s the one they use most.

Cloud-based work order management clarifies responsibility

With the old system, communication was hard not only for the people trying to submit requests but also the facility leads trying to manage them and the techs trying to close them out. Without a centralized system, the agency was trying to take care of work order assignments and updates with a disjointed collection of emails and text messages.

Now that everyone is working from the same data on one centralized source that’s updated in real time, it’s a lot easier to keep track of what needs to get done and who needs to do it, for both recurring preventive maintenance inspections and tasks and on-demand work orders. “A CMMS is an invaluable tool. It becomes a member of the team that you can always count on, and it makes that team stronger by establishing a single platform to document the work that you are responsible for,” Paul explains. And because their asset management is more streamlined, the agency now delivers better work, and more of it. Hippo has become “integral to our operation, improving our efficiency and capacity by eliminating multiple platforms and tasks.”