| Case Studies PM Worx Boosts Staff Productivity 
"Every department always tells me it needs more staff... PM Worx has proved that productivity is the key. It's about how well-organized you are, not how many people you have."Riverview - A Continuing Care Retirement Community, Spokane, Washington Riverview Retirement Community is a Christian organization affiliated with the Lutheran Church, providing health care, housing, and services to meet the spiritual, physical, and social needs of the community's 412 residents. The Riverview community encompasses 136 Independent Living units in The Village, 142 Assisted Living apartments at The Terrace, and 75 Skilled Nursing beds in The Care Center. Established in 1959, Riverview is the area's oldest Continuing Care Retirement Community under same ownership, and has a history that is rich with innovation and service. From pioneering the use of pets and plants in a care center environment to opening the first assisted living facility in Spokane, Riverview has been at the forefront of improvements in retirement services. The Search for Software Peggy Soden, VP of Administrative Services, has been at Riverview since 1987, and is responsible for HR, the computer system, and special projects at the community, which employs a staff of 225. Riverview's maintenance department includes six staff members and a supervisor, each with a particular skill or focus: electrical, plumbing, construction, painting, handyman. For much of Peggy's time at Riverview, maintenance requests had been made by means of clipboards located at a couple of spots on campus. Peggy explains her frustrations with the old system, "Our maintenance guys would go to one of the clipboards and cherry pick the best task from the list. We weren't prioritizing work requests, were rarely matching employee skills to the job at hand, and we certainly weren't making effective use of time." Meanwhile, Riverview's CEO was anxious to establish a comprehensive equipment inventory and a clear Preventative Maintenance schedule. Unfortunately, with the maintenance department spending most of its day on work requests, there was very little time left over for anything else. So Peggy went in search of software... and found it at the 2004 AAHSA national conference in Nashville, where she discovered Windmill Software's innovative solution for physical plant management. She learned how PM Worx has been designed specifically for senior living communities and contains everything Riverview needs to manage its maintenance - from handling work orders and requests, to sorting assets, scheduling Preventative Maintenance, ensuring compliance, tracking inventory, and preparing financial forecasts. Staff Allocation When implementing PM Worx, Peggy began by focusing on improving Work Order Management, to free up valuable time for the maintenance department to tackle Preventative Maintenance. Within no time, Peggy was seeing a return on the investment they'd made. Using PM Worx, Riverview is now much more efficient at allocating staff to carry out work orders. As Peggy points out, "Every department always tells me it needs more staff to do the job better. PM Worx has proved that productivity is the key. It's about how well-organized you are, not how many people you have." With the help of PM Worx, Riverview's maintenance supervisor can take a look at the work requests for the day ahead and divide them up efficiently. Peggy tells us, "Now we can better assign tasks to match employee skills. We can group jobs based on location, to avoid wasted time backtracking across campus. We can also allocate jobs according to the tools required, so our people don't have to return unnecessarily to base for equipment changes." Peggy also notes that PM Worx has helped them become more cost-conscious, "We make sure we use the least skilled employees for the routine jobs, like changing a light bulb, and keep the higher-paid, skilled workers for the more complex tasks." Peggy has found that PM Worx has helped her keep a close eye on outside contractors too, tracking how much she's spending with them. "For example, if I know how often we have to bring in guys from the outside for our heating and air conditioning, and how much they charge us, I can also work out when it becomes more cost-effective to add an HVAC specialist to our maintenance staff." Employee Development Peggy likes to use PM Worx's reporting capabilities to monitor performance and set goals for the maintenance department, as well as individual staff members. "When it comes to appraisal time, PM Worx gives me great insight into employee strengths and weaknesses," explains Peggy. "We can reward great performance and take action where achievement is falling below standards. And it's so much easier to set realistic goals when you can use PM Worx to demonstrate that other people are already achieving them." Happy Customers Every department at Riverview provides an essential service that contributes to enhancing the quality of resident life. As Peggy explains, "In Long Term Care, it's not just the nursing department providing the services; we gear our entire operation towards offering the best care at the best price. Our residents are our customers, and we always aim to increase customer satisfaction." Service levels are particularly evident when it comes to maintenance. "If maintenance is carried out in a timely manner, it gets noticed," believes Peggy. "In the resident's mind, every job is urgent because, more than likely, the problem is visible and close at hand." Peggy tells us that Riverview's single largest referral source is current residents, "Keeping them happy is the entire community's top priority," she says. Since the introduction of PM Worx, Peggy is also finding happier and more productive employees in every department at Riverview. "We've got a lot of people on site who can input work requests from terminals on the network," she says. "From the Nursing Department to Housekeeping, Food Services, Grounds, Activities, Administrative Offices, Sales & Marketing, Social Service Workers, and Receptionists, we have a large number of employees who no longer have to chase individual requests. It means they can concentrate on their own jobs and simply refer to the computer to check maintenance status." Preventative Plans Building on the successful implementation of Windmill Software's Work Order Management module, Riverview is now setting its sights on Preventative Maintenance. As part of the first phase of the retirement community's West Village expansion, the maintenance department has used PM Worx to inventory all of the new independent living housing units. Says Peggy, "It means we know what's in them from the get go, and understand when we need to schedule maintenance visits." They're now setting up inventories of the equipment in all of their other independent living spaces. "We're regularly updating our homes, and it's so much easier to check the computer to find out what's in each one than to schedule a visit just to see if we've already replaced the kitchen countertop," explains Peggy. PM Worx Because Maintenance Matters Windmill Software offers powerful Maintenance Management Solutions designed specifically for Senior Living Communities. From the Boardroom to the boiler room, PM Worx provides the tools to anticipate, request, manage, and control maintenance from anywhere on campus. Pop-up reminders trigger Preventative Maintenance, while Quality Assurance Measures monitor standards and ensure compliance. From Residents with maintenance requests, to Caregivers checking the status of work orders, CFOs planning capital budgets, Executive Directors putting quality and safety first, or Maintenance Directors making sense of work orders, PM Worx is the essential solution to give immediate, intelligent insight into the toughest maintenance questions. To learn more about Windmill Software and PM Worx, please visit
www.windmill-software.com or call 877-363-9679 toll-free |
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