Salt Lake City School District
Utah School System Gives an A+ to Increased Insight into Maintenance Productivity
Gregg Smith, Director of Facility Services for the Salt Lake City School District, has a lot to keep track of. Part of his job is managing a mobile maintenance crew of 64 tradespeople who meet the daily maintenance needs of the District’s 36 facilities. To ensure that his team is operating at peak efficiency, Smith needs constant visibility into work orders, travel time and the status of jobs and upkeep tasks. For that, Smith needs a product that can collect location, time and job information in the field and generate reliable, accurate reports on demand.
Smith found a means of addressing those challenges and more in the Xora GPS TimeTrack mobile solution, which provided the GPS tracking and integration functionality the District required and offered expanded reporting capabilities as well.
The Xora solution includes a mobile app that is downloaded onto employees’ mobile devices and collects location, time and job data and transmits it back to a secure web-based Xora management console. By accessing the Xora management console, Smith has all the information he needs to assess and improve the overall productivity and performance of the school district’s mobile maintenance force anytime and from any browser-based computer or mobile device with an Internet connection.
Using Data to Optimize Productivity
Xora streamlines data collection, reporting, and communications by enabling the District’s mobile maintenance crew to record shift start and stop times from their mobile devices. Workers also have access to easy-to-use forms to capture job-specific data including work orders, travel, vehicle tasks and training as well as time spent on meetings, miscellaneous tasks and personal time.
The District leverages the valuable information collected and managed by linking the data into its back-office systems. For example, Smith is able to integrate data collected in the field into the District’s work order application to generate reports that make it possible to analyze and improve overall facility management performance.
“The Xora solution allows me to produce a list that summarizes login/GPS status, current location and total hours worked,” says Smith. “I’m able to view data on each worker, job or location and compile all job details, including measuring the time workers spend traveling between and at each job location.”
Some of the information has been eye opening, according to Smith. “For the first time, we can see how much time is actually spent in travel, and we were surprised to learn that it’s as much as 20% of the work day.”
As a result of having this data, the District is considering using Xora for dispatching workers to minimize travel time. For example, Smith says he could use Xora to dispatch the closest worker to fill incoming job requests on the fly.
An End to Manual Time Entry
Prior to implementing Xora, the District used a paper-based system for tracking time and job data. Data was manually entered into a database from paper-based time sheets, an administrative task that took up to three hours each day. By having workers complete forms on their mobile devices, the District has reduced the administrative time associated with manually entering timesheets into a database by 90%, reducing costs and the potential for errors inherent in manual data entry.
Accuracy and Accountability
The change to Xora from the old paper system also has provided an improved structure for workers to report their time. Smith points to an old paper report in which one tradesman worked on two work orders on one transaction date, three work orders on another and five on another. For any given day, the worker charged every single hour of a nine-hour workday to a work order, with no detailed breakdown of travel or other times to help understand more specifically the amount of time spent just on the work order. “This was the old paradigm of how we conducted business,” says Smith. “Obviously we knew that travel and other times were included in the hours charged to a work order, but we didn’t have the capability of more detailed and comprehensive data gathering and reporting. We needed specifics and that’s what Xora delivers.”
To illustrate the change in reporting accuracy since implementing Xora, Smith refers to a timecard from the same tradesman. “Our same worker now records two nine- hour workdays, completing four work orders on one day with a total work time of 7.8 hours, and four work orders the next day with a total of 6.5 total work hours reported,” he says. “We’ve configured Xora so that workers can track travel, miscellaneous tasks and vehicle tasks separately, something they couldn’t do before. Understanding specific job costs gives us an opportunity to better understand where money is going so that in the future we can fine tune and trim the budget.”
A Powerful Personnel Management Tool
Overall, Smith is impressed with the degree of accountability and flexibility that Xora affords. For example, the District was able to configure Xora to match its own procedures and expectations. “Xora provides us with an extremely powerful personnel management tool,” Smith says. “The shift and job-related data that we download into our Excel-based work order system, along with GPS location information, give us the ability to verify exactly what our mobile employees are doing at any time of the day.”
Planning Ahead
Smith has been using Xora for nine months and the metrics he has collected will be used to improve future operational efficiency. Xora reports will make it possible for him to gauge the impact of vacation, sick and personal time for planning resources. This, combined with plans to improve productivity by reducing travel time through better routing and scheduling, will be the next steps in testing the capabilities Xora has to offer.
Ultimately, the Salt Lake City School District intends to use Xora to analyze historical data to assess and improve employee productivity, payroll costs, job performance and service satisfaction levels.
“We take pride in delivering excellence in service. Xora has been instrumental in helping us to do that, giving us insight into how we can best manage our remote employees and optimize our resources.”
Gregg Smith, Director of Facility Services, Salt Lake City School District
