Building Tech-Enabled Maintenance Workflows

Planning: Triaging Maintenance Tickets

When a tenant or owner makes a request, a staff member receives a notification in their maintenance software to review the task and assign it to the appropriate in-house staff or external vendor.

Here's how:

Give your staff the tools and guidance they need to prioritize maintenance tickets appropriately and route them to the right vendors or in-house personnel. To put together your guidelines, answer these questions:

• What constitutes an emergency or urgent task? Make a list of tasks that fall under those categories.
• How do you prioritize non-emergency maintenance requests? Give staff clear guidance on which requests take precedence. For example, a leaking faucet that could cause further damage might take precedence over peeling linoleum.
• How do you schedule regular maintenance and large-scale projects? Have staff use their maintenance dashboard to schedule routine maintenance, such as mowing the lawn, along with larger renovation projects, leaving time for one-offs.
• How do you delegate tasks across maintenance staff? Decide what kind of tasks, and how many, each member of your maintenance team can handle at once.

Use a simple priority framework so everyone on your team sorts requests the same way. The table below shows one way to structure it:

When a request comes in, walk through the same steps every time:

• Confirm whether the request is an emergency
• Check for any safety or habitability risk
• Tag the priority level in your software
• Assign the task to the right in-house staff member or vendor
• Notify the resident with a timeline for the work
• Set a follow-up reminder to confirm the job is done

Assigning: Alerting Stakeholders to Tasks

To assign a maintenance task, your property management software should let you do the following:

• Select the appropriate staff member.
• Select the type of maintenance task from a customized list.
• Select the priority level.
• Leave notes and attach images or video.

Staff and Vendors

Each member of your staff and each of your vendors should have access to your maintenance software. When you assign the task, the assigned staff or vendor gets a notification.

Owners and Tenants

Your owners and tenants need to be notified, as well. Your maintenance workflow should include a notification step, where they receive an update on the timeline of their request along with the person assigned to it.

Executing the Work: Tracking Maintenance Projects

After staff and vendors are assigned tasks, they can update the status through the portal, which triggers a notification for you. When you log into your dashboard, you can see the status of every task at once.

When maintenance workers update tasks, you can send notifications to tenants or owners.

Finishing the Work: Closing Out Tasks

When a task or project is completed, it's important to close it out. When you do, your dashboard clears those tasks from staff or vendors, so you can assign them other work. It also gives you an accurate picture of how long the work took to complete.

Analytics: Measuring the Maintenance Process for Efficiency

The final step of your maintenance workflow is analysis. Use the information collected through requests, tickets, scheduling, and tracking to improve your process and cut down on time and money. Property management maintenance analytics can do that in three ways:

• Predictive Maintenance: Use data analytics to forecast when equipment or systems are likely to fail, and address issues before they become major problems.
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Monitor and track important KPIs, the numbers you use to measure the success of your business, such as maintenance response times, completion rates, and tenant satisfaction levels.
• Resource Allocation: By understanding which types of requests are most common and which take the most time and resources, managers can prioritize tasks and deploy their teams more effectively.

Property management software that includes an analytics dashboard can help property managers track all of these numbers and use them to gain efficiency and lower costs.

To get the most from your data, it helps to know the difference between two approaches:

Track a handful of numbers so you can see how your process is working and where to improve:

Customer Spotlight: Stahl Enterprises and the Buffalo Snowstorm

In 2022, Winter Storm Elliott hit Buffalo and Rochester, NY, over the course of five days, bringing over 56 inches of snow and causing widespread damage to properties, including snow accumulation in attics and ceiling collapses.

How Buildium Helped Stahl's Team

Greg Stahl of Stahl Enterprises had to act quickly to deploy his maintenance team and work through each of his 25 damaged units, which was more than eight percent of their residential units. Stahl's maintenance workflows within Buildium helped him do that.

• Maintenance Management: Buildium's tools let Stahl's team isolate requests related to snow in attics, prioritize urgent issues, and coordinate repairs efficiently.
• Real-Time Communication: Stahl and his team used Buildium's resident portal to capture and triage work requests as they came in, and to keep tenants apprised of the situation through updates.
• Connected Workflow: The Buildium platform supported effective communication between maintenance staff and management, even in challenging conditions. Stahl could assign tasks to contractors in the field and get real-time updates as jobs were completed.

The Results