The Tech Factor

Traditionally, O&M teams have employed hub-and-spoke models to assign work orders, log hours and capture job completion/status information. In a hub-and-spoke, technicians will typically visit a central dispatch office to collect their paperwork orders before venturing out into the field. At the end of each shift, the same technicians will usually return to the dispatch office to hand in the completed work orders, where handwritten job details will be entered into the organization’s enterprise asset management (EAM) system by the office staff.

During COVID-19, the central dispatch office was often inaccessible due to social gathering and distancing limits, forcing changes in the way work is assigned, work orders and assignments are carried out, and completed jobs are recorded in the EAM system. These new ways are likely to remain permanent.

Because of advances in technology, FM functions did not have to shut down or suffer massive slowdowns to comply with safe gathering limits and social distancing recommendations. As O&M functions evolved over the pandemic, several observations became clear:

1. Mobile devices for FM technicians became ubiquitous

Though many forward-thinking teams had already adopted mobile devices to assign and track work orders, many more had not.

In March 2020, paper-based orders were still the norm in many organizations, meaning staff had to pick up assignments in a physical office and return them to the office once the work was complete. With COVID-19, each of those physical touchpoints introduced risk. As the virus spread, these organizations scrambled to arm staff with mobile devices to eliminate the exchange of paper forms and minimize, if not eliminate, visits to the dispatch office.

One convenience store chain operating more than 600 locations needed to maintain stores and equipment to supply freshly prepared foods, groceries and gasoline to the communities it serves. By providing tablets to its O&M teams, they were not only able to eliminate dispatch office visits but were able to streamline work for their field technicians, as well as improve productivity, first-fix rates and equipment availability across their stores.

2. Tighter inventory control

It is quite common for O&M teams to use EAM software for inventory control, but some organizations are better than others at keeping records accurate. COVID-19 highlighted the need for better recordkeeping and inventory control, mostly due to the need to manage scarce Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Many hospitals kept PPE under lock and key, treating it almost as they would medicine in the hospital pharmacy. Losing a box of light bulbs may not be a big deal, but losing a case of masks early in the pandemic would have had a significant impact on staff and patient safety. Virtually every health care organization had to up their inventory control game, adopting barcode scanning to quickly and accurately log the issuance of PPE items to hospital personnel.

Mobile was also widely deployed for processes such as receipt and issuance, where newly arrived shipments are scanned as they arrive in the receiving area and then scanned again as they are distributed to storerooms across the facility. Along the same lines, mobile devices are also being used to audit storeroom balances to assure that the receipts and issuances reconcile, or in larger facilities, perform physical cycle counts (a partial, statistically determined sampling of critical inventory), and well as enable item reservations to set aside specific quantities of PPE or earmark respiratory equipment.

3. Extensive use of push notifications for staff & community updates

Emergency management plans — which many organizations activated for the first time during the pandemic — typically require the means to notify the community, including staff , of an incident or new restriction. During and after the COVID-19 era, that might include letting staff know that a building had been shut down or flagged due to an outbreak. When staff members are equipped with mobile devices, it is very easy to send out push notifications to those devices informing everyone of new restrictions.

One of the advantages of push notifications is that most mobile users are already familiar with them. According to Accengage’s 2018 Push Notification Benchmark, overall consumer opt-in rates for app push notifications are 67.5 percent, with a 91.1 percent opt-in rate for Android and 43.9 percent for iOS devices. The disparity is driven by the fact that iOS users must explicitly consent to push notifications, whereas Android allows push notifications to be enabled automatically. In a work environment, opt-in rates typically approach 100 percent because the mobile app is critical to the operations of the facility.

Many organizations are also using those notifications to remind staff to maintain safe working environments, such as updated protocols for social distancing, new disinfection requirements, PPE guidelines or vaccination regimens.

Push notifications have also been effective in alerting operations and maintenance staff to changing priorities, allowing key personnel to be pulled off of a current assignment and redeployed to respond to a COVID-19 incident.

4. Increased use of checklists & audits

While most organizations already utilized checklists for multi-step tasks, inspections and audits, few had digitized them, and many did not track the completion of the assignment. Now, in the era of COVID-19, new health and safety guidelines may require proof that checklists were followed, and completed tasks logged. For example, universities are required to clean and sanitize common areas, and high-touch surfaces such as door handles, as frequently as every 30 minutes. Because many of these areas are subject to inspection and audit by local health authorities, the sanitization teams are required to show proof that all surfaces on the checklist were cleaned, and the start and stop times for when the cleaning was performed. In response to new health requirements, university O&M teams are digitizing their checklists to guide staff through the sanitization processes or inspections, and to record completed actions and subsequent inspections in their mobile app — providing an easy way to share detailed documentation with administrators and health department auditors.

5. Contractor check-in

When dispatch offices were dialed back to eliminate the need to gather staff in a central location, there was still a need to communicate with outside contractors and tradesman that perform critical tasks across the organization’s facilities.

Prepandemic, those tradespeople typically checked in at the central dispatch office to pick up paperwork orders, and alerted the FM team that they were now on site. With the use of mobile technologies, the organizations eliminated the paperwork orders while enabling the contractor to check in, either through an explicit action that creates a notification, or by GIS features that detect the contractor’s arrival on the facility’s grounds. This is sometimes tied to the activation of access-control badges allowing the contractor access to specific areas of the facility.

The adoption and expanded use of mobile will not end when COVID-19 eventually does. Many of these mobile-enabled work and safety practices have made FM and O&M teams significantly more efficient, and as such, it does not make sense to revert to the old way of doing things. While it is really hard to find a silver lining from all that has transpired over this last year, it did create the impetus for organizations to adopt and/or expand the use of mobile technologies to comply with health and safety guidelines.

By doing so, they were also able to streamline operations, adopt better processes for functions such as inventory management, inspections, receiving and physical counts, improve audits and enhance organizational communications via push notifications. The use of mobile technologies has transformed the operations and maintenance function, improving transparency and efficiency, and perhaps more importantly, preparing organizations to rapidly respond to the next crisis or outbreak.