Managing maintenance? There’s an app for that

Hannelore Fineman

MARLTON, NJ—Maintenance workers in hotels, resorts, and casinos are always on the move. They’re all over the place fixing and repairing things to keep the property top-notch. But as in other departments, customer service is paramount. It is becoming more and more critical that maintenance workers have mobile technology to manage, report, and update their activity.

Hannelore Fineman is executive VP of eMaint. Her company has developed an app for their award-winning maintenance management software. 
eMaint offers work order and work request management, and tracking of building assets for requests that can come from the front desk, or from the maintenance and facilities department.

“Whether it’s the guest in Room 400 reporting an issue, or the general manager identifying a concern, we can capture the information easily in web form, respond to the client’s need, and a work order is automatically routed to the appropriate supervisor.  It’s a fast way of getting information into the system,” Fineman says.

This system compares favourably with the old method of calling maintenance, sending and e-mail or jotting something on paper.  And even an e-mail request would have to be retyped or re-entered to get the request to the proper people.

eMaint automatically generates a work request with date and time, sends an e-mail to the person who is to do the work, and an e-mail back to the person who made the request.

Smartphones enable urgent issues to be routed to the correct person, so that they can tackle the problem right away.

Managers receive dashboard reports with charts and graphs to measure and track response and completion rates.  They can  also analyze costs and break work orders down by type.  All this leads to improved customer satisfaction rates, says Fineman.

eMaint also enables properties to set up scheduled preventative maintenance, for chillers, boilers and HVAC systems, for example. This  can help energy efficiency as well.

“eMaint enables properties to holistically look at their operations—which assets have optimal performance and which break down, how many requests, how many hours spent and how much money,” Fineman concludes.