In any organization, there is one team that keeps things moving along so everyone else can do their jobs: maintenance and facilities. But their work is often repetitive and manual, and employees receive work orders on paper forms and must track and report their tasks with paper-based checklists.
Now, there is a solution that will automate those inefficient workflows, save time, and reduce costs: Beekeeper’s new Maintenance and Inspections package.
This addition to Beekeeper’s platform for frontline teams offers organizations a way to digitize and automate maintenance and inspection workflows that can:
- Minimize downtime and disruptions
- Reduce overall costs
- Optimize maintenance activities
- Enhance workplace safety
By integrating this package into Beekeeper’s mobile-first platform, all facilities and maintenance documentation is secured in one location. Not only does this ensure compliance, but it makes life easier for maintenance workers who can manage checklists and tasks through their mobile devices.
What Do Maintenance and Inspection Teams Do?
Whether it’s in a hotel, a hospital, a manufacturing facility, or a retail store, facilities teams ensure operational efficiency so that everyone else has a safe and productive space.
Some of their responsibilities include:
- Routine inspections of various parts of the facility
- Responding to work orders from different parts of the organization
- Optimize your operations and processes
- Maintain and inspect equipment and tools to ensure they operating properly to reduce downtime and avoid equipment failures
- Emergency repairs
- Utility maintenance: electrical, plumbing
- Fire systems and safety
- Inventory management
There are many moving parts to maintenance operations and many tasks to complete and track. Workers must also notify managers and colleagues of what’s been done, what needs to be addressed, and any safety concerns. Everyone needs to be on the same page to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.
But many facilities teams rely on pen and paper to manage their work: from filling out inspection checklists to creating and receiving work orders. When an issue needs to be addressed, employees fill out a maintenance request form and turn it into a manager who must then process the form and create a work order. It’s a long process that can take days.
With Beekeeper’s Maintenance and Inspection package, this process takes minutes.
In order to effectively do their jobs, maintenance teams need better tools.
Why Ditch Paper Processes?
For many facilities and maintenance teams, paper processes have always been the way things have been done. A maintenance checklist on a clipboard seems straightforward and easy. But there are drawbacks to relying on paper-based checklists, like:
- Time is critical! Paper processes slow workflows down and increase disruptions.
- Sharing information with the team is difficult when it’s kept on a sheet of paper.
- Facilities teams need continuity of workflows from one shift to the next which is difficult when information is siloed and fragmented on multiple pieces of paper.
- Poor maintenance management can lead to more downtime, higher repair costs, and loss of productivity.
Companies that rely on paper documentation and manual maintenance and inspection workflows grapple with data accuracy, problems with efficiency, and information accessibility. This impacts consistency and safety, can lead to more errors, and eventually impact a company’s productivity and revenue.
How Digital Maintenance Management Improves Operations
In short, automating and digitizing maintenance management improves efficiency, productivity, and safety—the ultimate goals for any operations team.
Beekeeper’s Maintenance and Inspections is a mobile-first solution for paperless workflows for frontline teams.
By switching paper workflows to digital ones with the Maintenance and Inspections package, frontline workers can:
- Decrease downtime and disruptions
- Stay compliant with easy tracking and automatic documentation
- Ensure maintenance tasks are completed correctly and consistently to reduce the frequency of accidents, repairs, and unplanned breakdowns
- Shorten the time between detecting and fixing potential hazards and the amount of time it takes to fix the hazard/time to resolution
- Optimize your maintenance management process to reduce overall maintenance costs and enhance workplace safety
- Use real-time checklist tracking so everyone knows jobs completed and issues addressed to avoid redundancy
- Upload images to Beekeeper of maintenance issues or repairs for documentation
- Enable managers to easily assign and track tasks
- Have immediate access to all resources they need to complete tasks
- Report safety hazards right away
Maintenance and inspection management has never been easier.
Here are a few ways Beekeeper’s Maintenance and Inspections package improves operations.
Prevent Unplanned Breakdowns and Downtime That Bleeds Your Bottom Line Dry
Preventive maintenance is an essential part of facilities work. Ensuring machinery and equipment are performing properly to avoid equipment breakdowns and failures saves money in repairs and the downtime they create.
With digital workflows, frontline workers can easily fill out a digital form to examine tools or complete an opening checklist to uncover any defects. Recordkeeping is simple—all submissions are automatically stored for future reference. This catches breakdowns before they happen, improves production uptime, and reduces operational costs due to unplanned downtime. Paperless recordkeeping creates continuity so no equipment misses an inspection.
Schedule Preventative Maintenance
Often, maintenance work involves routine inspections of a building or property, inside and out. From sprinkler systems to pest control, every inch of a property needs to be regularly checked. But keeping up with who did what when is difficult to track.
Papers get lost and information goes missing. With this package, workers can look up when an area was last inspected, what the report says, and receive alerts when it’s time to do an inspection again. When issues are discovered, workers can easily fill out a digital work order to fix the problem.
Real-Time Work Tickets Improve Safety
Maintenance teams often receive work orders, either from their own employees, their managers, or another person working in the organization. With paper-based requests, it could take days or weeks for the notice to reach the right worker before an item was addressed. With the Maintenance and Inspections package, employees are automatically assigned a task to review, prioritize, and repair the issue immediately through their mobile devices.
Stay in Compliance with Comprehensive Records
Doing the manual work is only part of a maintenance employee’s job. There’s the record-keeping which is critical to keeping track of what’s been addressed, inspected, and repaired. With Beekeeper, teams can automatically organize digital documentation of any inspection forms, checklists, maintenance requests, and scheduled maintenance. You can easily navigate to a specific file or task, or analyze your maintenance processes by exporting an overview.
Mandates and regulations for how a facility is maintained often require meticulous recordkeeping. Digital records are centralized in a document library to ensure maintenance and safety regulations are met and companies are in compliance.
The Features of Beekeeper’s Maintenance Management System
This new Maintenance and Inspections package includes features specific to the needs of facilities teams.
They include:
- Forms & QR code pre-filled forms: maintenance request/work order, etc.
- Tasks (incl. bulk tasks & sub-tasks): checklists, maintenance inspections, maintenance repairs, etc.
- Streams & Chats: share maintenance-related updates with the right people quickly
- Document Library: 24/7 access to maintenance resources & SOPs and automatic documentation maintenance-related reports/forms. What’s more, you can attach documents (like SOPs) to tasks for reference
- Workflows: automatically gets form submissions to the right people and automatically assigns tasks
- Form & Task Analytics: evaluate important metrics like time to resolution, the volume of maintenance tasks – and can compare between locations
This Maintenance and Inspections package adds to the already robust platform that empowers and engages frontline workers.
How Beekeeper Customer Foodstuffs Saves Time with Digital Forms
With 330 stores, Foodstuffs is New Zealand’s largest grocery retailer. That’s a lot of square footage for the facilities teams to take care of. Before Beekeeper, it took the staff two to three days to complete maintenance forms, and an additional eight hours each week to process the paper forms.
By digitizing this process with Beekeeper, it now takes just three minutes to complete and process maintenance forms.
Say goodbye to manual processes and paperwork. Digitize and automate your maintenance and facilities workflows to reduce costs, boost safety, and increase efficiency in your organization. And give your maintenance teams the tools they need to be more productive.
If you’re a current customer, contact your customer success manager to try our new Maintenance and Inspections package.
