Debunked: 5 Common Myths about a CMMS

Share my screen. Here we go. Look at me. So, I'm Katie Gromajo. I work for Brightly right now. I'm the senior industry marketing manager, which is a fancy way of saying I'm helping the marketing team think about education, and be the expert in that subject matter. I used to be the director of operations at the Windward School, which has three campuses sustainability scheduling and operations. As we all know, schools have some interesting titles to fit many jobs into one person. Schools have some interesting titles to fit many jobs into one person. And that was at Campbell Hall School in Los Angeles. So I've been doing this for about twelve years. And I as I'm sure everyone on this call knows, being in schools and specifically in facilities and operations, we're customer service. We're customer service for our colleagues, for faculty, staff, for students, parents, board members, and everyone. And always do our job well and efficiently and finish our facilities tickets and get make our lives easier. But sometimes, it's very hard to reflect the work we've been doing and help our own teams, our maintenance teams, complete the tasks they need to as easily as possible. So another thing you may have heard from schools is fear of change. And so I think there are a lot of myths out there. That's where we started this idea keeping you from starting a CMMS system. CMMS is computerized maintenance management system. In case you weren't sure, I'm sure you probably were since you're on this call, but if you weren't, that's what it stands for. If you already have one, you can go to the next level, which is AIP, which we can talk about hopefully in another webinar someday, which is asset investment planning. But today, we're gonna at the beginning. So if you haven't even started with the CMMS and you're not sure where to start or you're trying to start, here's the five things that we hear all the time about why we might not start. One, I have no control over my facility's budget anyway. They just decide it for me, so I don't actually need this. Two, implementing a new system is complicated and time consuming. I feel like that might be the biggest one. Three in conjunction with three. Three, training staff on new technology is impossible. Four, all I need is an IT ticketing system. I don't need all this complicated maintenance management management system at all. And five, facilities management is not impacted by sustainability trends. So, myth one, let's start there. I have no control over my facility's budget. The first thing I would say to them is there's always limited funding in schools, whether you're private or public or higher ed or k twelve. And that means you're always competing for money with usually more flashy student centric priorities, which makes it harder for some facilities upgrades to get budgeted for if there's no understanding on the importance and they're not something that people can truly see and understand how it impacts the day to day. The other thing you'll need to think about is how are you going to explain what your needs are to your finance leaders? In a school, there's usually a CFO, a superintendent. A lot of facilities leaders don't really know how to explain the infrastructure and asset concerns that they are having. And it's not that they don't know what they need, but the process of explaining it to the finance leaders, is usually challenging because it's a complex budget talk that doesn't usually have a common language between facilities and finance. I'm sure we all know what I'm talking about in that asset. So, the other thing is facilities directors can actually influence budget allocation if we have strategic planning and data to back our requests. So I have often been asked from since I was at a private school CFO, not a superintendent, but same idea, why? Why do you need this money? Why do I need to spend it this year? Why can't it make it till next year? And your data will in your CMMS, will give you historical records, asset health. It'll show you the downtime that you've had on that asset, the repair costs you've had over the last year, how much extra labor has been done every time someone has to come in at midnight because it's down again and you have school the next day. And it will also show your preventative and proactive maintenance asset health. So that will prove to your finance leader that you are doing your due diligence and you still need some funding. And then finally, having a CMMS also empowers your own team to present the data they need to justify our budget requests. So myth two is the one that always comes to mind. Starting something new is challenging and time consuming. I will say that sometimes it is, but I think that there's actually more challenges in a traditional approach than in doing something that is actually easier for you. So a traditional approach is old school filing cabinets. They're not up to date. They take a long time to find your information. Even if you're you're using technology, you have a really great advanced Excel spreadsheet with lots of sheets and tabs and formulas. It still requires constant updating and human data collection or it's kind of pointless. It's never up to date. Or anytime someone asks you a question, you have to quickly update it. Also, if you have only historical records in physical files or even just in someone's mind, which I'm sure we all have been in that case before, then you may not be able to access that past staff member if they leave, if they win the lotto and go somewhere, and then you don't have the information to pass on to your new staff, and it also adds a lot more onboarding problems. A CMMS will prioritize your simplicity for the managers and the technicians. It's really quick to implement. There's mobile apps for your technicians that'll be convenient and efficient, And it's very intuitive, so it hopefully minimizes user errors. And, also, the main process is the original data collection. The team, the product training, the software release is all easier. The data collection is the hardest part if you don't have any records at all. Hopefully, you do. But if you don't, you can do it yourself, or Brightly can help you and offers on-site implementation. So myth three, gaining buy in from employees to use new technology is impossible. Everyone knows those employees that are scared of change, specifically change that involves technology. It is often challenging for people. We've all probably gotten a software or we've received it from someone else that selected for us to use and been burned when it didn't work the way you hoped or the user environment was more challenging. I have done this, and it is very hard once you've had people shut down because they didn't like it anymore to get them on board. The good news is CMMS is so simple to use that once your data collection is done, it has real time mobile updating so that your technicians won't forget to keep their records. I know that I dealt with a lot of problems in my last team, my last maintenance team because they would say, well, I'm never sitting at a computer. I'm running around. I'm running around schools. I'm running around the building. I'm never going to sit at a computer and update these records or respond to that ticket. So having the mobile updating is one of the best things. The three things that I think are really important is that mobile app, like I just said, designed for simplicity. There's also an easy work view summary where the supervisor can build custom lists and track the workload and also track your team. I find it's really important that if you're also asking, this happened to me quite a few times, for more staff, then you need the data to say, my staff is working all the time. They've done this many tickets in this many hours. They've completed this much, and we still aren't getting our ticket load done. And then you have the data to prove that because if not, you often will get the question of, well, how do we know they're working to the best of their ability or they're using their time well? So you can view work summaries, build custom lists for your workload. And like I said, the supervisors can really customize their historical data, create goals, and manage some of their maintenance costs and inventory. So myth number four. A lot of people will think all I need is an IT ticketing system. So I did start with an IT ticketing system in one of my past lives, and it was a good place to start. It was essentially where you get an email ticketing system. You send an email to maintenance at Briteley Software, and then they can assign it to someone and close it. Great. Sounds like that's enough, but it's actually not. And if you're going to start there, it's a good place to start, but the next place is CMMS because other than we completed this task, you're not actually keeping any records. In order to extend your asset life, you really need a preventative maintenance plan. And in order to do that, you need to have holistic maintenance management, which means you're identifying which assets are problematic, which unit is always breaking down, how old is it, and have you been been maintaining it? We like to use that analogy of a car. You know, everyone tells you you have to do your oil change every five thousand miles. I hope that's right. And but if you don't, you will have to do more repairs. But if you don't pay attention to that and you forget for a couple months and it keeps going, then you're actually going to add more costs down the line. So we all know that, but it's hard when you're looking at multiple buildings, multiple campuses, all different assets that you can't keep track of it all in one place. In particular, if you're a district or a school that has multiple campuses like I had, you're not in the building. You're in one building, and there's four other buildings down the in a different town, in different city, and you can't quickly check all your assets at once. Another thing is that it will give you a trend analysis, and that's like your asset work history, frequency of failure, and your maintenance costs. And it will also give you your asset life cycle analysis. So it will grade your assets on a scale of a through f based on your work order frequency, cost trends, and that will help you justify your budget requests when it comes time for that. It will also help you locate your corrective maintenance work orders based on categories. So you can see how often you've had the same problem, the same cause, the same category, and that will help you prioritize and justify your spend needs. And it will make it so much simpler for you because you'll have the graphs, the key performance indicators, the KPIs, the automatic reports so that you can tell stakeholders. And in this case, stakeholders is administration, but also the school, the work that you're completing, the work that's pending, and what budget it's gonna take. Because we all know people will constantly be asking if you're doing something, and then you'll be able to show that you are. Myth five. Facilities management is not impacted by sustainability trends. So you may remember from the beginning of this presentation that I spoke a lot that I said one of my titles was sustainability director or something of that nature. Sustainability is actually a very important topic these days. I know it sounds like it's just a buzzword, but it actually is being mandated by not just government and local school districts, but it's being asked for by board members, by community, by students, by faculty. I'm sure we've all had those requests. And so we, as facilities leaders, have to be ready. We have to be ready. Sustainability is often seen as just a costly thing that isn't actually necessary, but it is since now we have more and more jurisdiction. Just for example, New York had a few different things. The New York local law ninety seven, where facilities leaders are asked to make changes, decrease energy use, or your carbon output. And it's very hard to tangibly show those improvements without a CMMS. You can look at your utility bills, but it's not as simple. And has just using a CMMS and pulling out a report that says this building is using this amount of energy, and I've cut that in the last six months. And here's my pretty chart that will prove it to you. The goal of sustainability, yes, I'm sure we know, but it's to improve assets and infrastructure for future communities. And as more regulations are being embraced, more people are interested in it. I also think it's one of those things that it's a pressing issue from, generation z and the younger issues. I'm I was asked by parent committees, by board members, by student groups how our facilities able to be more green or more sustainably responsible. And we had to figure out how to do it and how to prove that we did it, for the community. I will say a fact that we've been talking about recently at Brightley is that seventy five percent of prospective students in higher ed at the Princeton Review say a school's commitment to environmental sustainability affects their decision to attend. So not only do students care, but then the administration obviously cares because that's enrollment. Cost savings seems simple enough using more sustainable practices when you're building new construction, but also finding energy waste. Sometimes it's as simple as timers on your lights. Sometimes it is composting. But how do you know what to do and where you're being inefficient? A software can often help you find those places and then justify the cost of any improvements you need to do. And, finally, that's I guess that's what I just said. The right tool like a CMMS can really help you prove and communicate to your community or a government official that needs you to do something specific what you've done and that you have met the goals to lower your energy costs. So, really, a CMMS is a return on investment of change. It's a little scary to start. We all know change is scary. But for this one, the impact of it really justifies costs your administrative said, you don't really need to constantly sit at a desk and update the spreadsheet. You have your mobile app where you can update it on the job. The technicians can update it, and then you can fix it. You can enhance your repair efficiency, which will result in reduced labor costs. And that leads to my next one, which is minimize downtime impact. We all have been there when the air conditioning is broken and you have to move something, an event, or you have to change something or, god forbid, you have to is close school, which we had to do once. That is a downtime impact on the whole community. And on top of that, if something is down, you're getting you're usually getting overtime charges for your staff. So if you have a CMMS software facilitating your proactive maintenance, you're prepared for those things and hopefully won't have as much downtime or cost revenue loss. The obvious one, increased productivity. It allows your technicians to diagnose diagnose and repair all of the things that they're working on quickly, but also respond in real time to other tickets. So if there's we all know sometimes you're working on a project and then an emergency comes up and you have to drop everything. You have that all in real time. It also automates your documentation and helps your technicians follow checklists that you can set up for them to make sure they don't forget a step. If every time they go to a certain unit, they have to make sure they flip this switch that everyone always forgets, you can have it on checklist for them. So it really helps with your productivity. It will help with your inventory management. It'll not only track your parts and your tools, but it will help with inventory forecasting. So, I have been in places where people were ordering willy nilly cleaning supplies because they thought they were low, but they didn't actually realize there were some somewhere else. Or they weren't low, but they were so afraid that they were going to be, they would overbuy, and we still have, and I'm sure a lot of you do, so much hand sanitizer from the pandemic. So it will help you with your overall inventory control and cut down on your administrative maintenance insights, which is organizing your maintenance data into reports, like we talked about before, providing a foundation for informed like we talked about before, providing a foundation for informed decision making, and budget justification. So there's a lot of good things in a CMMS. And as you know, I work for Brightly. So at Brightly, there is a solution for most of this. And I am not a salesperson, but I'd be happy to connect anyone if they're interested, but you can find it all on our website. But at Brightly, we have a couple different things that can help you with all of these problems. So Asset Essentials is our main, CMMS system that will give your maintenance team the power to shift from preventative maintenance to schedule service before your asset fails, and then take that data to your next board of ed meeting or board of trustees meeting or anywhere you need to so that you can justify what's going wrong and why and what will need to be replaced and why. We also have an event manager, which I was always in charge of all the events, which is sometimes very complicated if your staff is doing both facilities and events, which is the case at most educational institutions. So it will centralize all your details for facilities rentals, scheduling, invoicing, payments, but also the scheduling with your staff. It's sim same ticketing, so they get those tickets as well as their maintenance tickets. Origin is that level up section that I talked about a little bit in the beginning. Once you have a CMMS, something like asset essentials, your next step is really an AIP, asset investment planning software, which is taking the data from your CMMS system and then helping you with capital spending predictions, letting you know how much it's gonna cost for those replacement assets over the next five, ten, twenty, thirty years. Actually, it goes pretty far out. And then allowing you to try different, predictive scheduling for your financial plan, and then you'll be able to talk to your superintendent or your CFO or director of finance and show them what you think you will need in the next five years. Because I feel like that was question they always would ask me. What do I need to pay for in the next five years? And though you don't have a crystal ball, CMMS can help. And then finally, the last piece is that sustainability piece we talked about, which is Energy Manager. Besides just looking at your bills, you can pull all of that data into software automatically, and then you can see not just your energy and what you're paying for in electricity, but your water, your gas, all of those things, and see what you're overspending on and where the costs are increasing or overspending. And then you can address that and then prove that you addressed that. So it's a good it's a good way to tackle that problem. And then finally, this is me. I have a blog. I also link to a bunch of different, assets on our website. We have this really great form about how much your events are really costing you, including your staff salaries and all the assets that are being used. And we have a couple other things about spending and planning for education. So with that, I don't see any questions right now. Are there any questions that I can help anyone with?