Loving this topic!!!

I'm nodding my head with every comment. In my past, worked on properties and handled service requests in a variety of fashions. From no S.R. documentation to being required to write an encyclopedia for each need and repair. In my opinion the service request is best handled when everyone on the community understands the purpose, and makes use of the information that is <potentially> available.

Think about it like a Hospital's patient records. That patient record serves multiple functions:

-A patient history (keeping track of issues both relevant and not relevant to the current illness)
-It is a record of both test results and what was done in the past (in case further diagnosis is needed)
-Permission to continue or discontinue treatment (for legal cause)
-Record of supplies used (for both accounting and inventory purposes)
-Staffing needs (ability to look back after a large scale emergency and anticipate better response)
-Training needs (if one particular illness is not being cured as quickly as other hospitals report)
-Preventative measures (record of vitamins or other healthy measures to prevent illness)
-Document of time (how many personnel are involved in this patients care for consult if needed)
-Identify and diagnose trends (does the hospital need to increase vaccination efforts?)

While this analogy may be a little heavy handed, service requests are needed by more than just the staff performing the repairs. Yes, the current process is at times as inefficient as the hospital insurance adjuster taking a diagnostic history from a patient to tell the brain surgeon where to cut. At the same time; we need the insurance adjuster involved to ensure all the documentation is correct or else the hospital is in legal trouble.

The on-site staff is experiencing a high amount of change. I actually spoke with an Exec recently that was investigating ways of removing office personnel from properties because of how much can be done "on the cloud". He stated that with this goal in mind, his maintenance staff would carry even more of the load of company identity and customer satisfaction than what they currently do.

I think that one day, there will be a more direct line between the resident and technician, as you propose Perry; Because of all of the challenges (both in the office and in maintenance dept) I don't think we are there quite yet.

No, actually I was suggesting taking the office out of the loop altogether. Most apartment repairs involve little or no expense, a bit of Teflon tape, a longer screw, putting a hanging door back on track, that sort of thing. What's the advantage of involving the office for something like that? If an apartment needs a new water heater or any other major repair, the request could be escalated to the office once diagnosed. Less paperwork, better customer service, I can't tell you how many times a tenant has flagged me down while I was picking up the grounds and said
"Hey, can you fix this?"
And I said "No, you'll have to put in a work order."
"Why?" askes the tenant.
"I don't know." Says I... and I feel like a class 'A' fool for saying it.

Love the contrarian thoughts, Perry.
We would prefer a paperless work order system, where office teams enter the info in ResMan (rather than onto a post-it note and THEN enter it), and the Technician reports completion through the app, and it sends a survey automatically to the resident. We have the capability but we are still using paper...
Good discussion! Thanks for starting it!

Did working toward that goal include not using work-orders at all? If so, what was the result? Which goes back to my original question on this thread. Paraphrasing a marketing book I read recently, "In business, you won't understand if you need something until you try doing without it." That made sense to me, but I'm not in business.

LOVE your perspective, Perry! You are too funny! And Mindy, you are too smart!

Sorry to jump in late, but wanted to answer your "Maintenance Work Flow" question. As you know (better than I) you can't just complete work orders in the order people called. Someone has to to organize them by priority/urgency (not the resident's urgency, but the actual potential for damage!) If the Maintenance Tech has to stop everytime a service request comes in and shuffle his work load, it's one more drain on his/her time.

As for the importance of logging time, you are so right about different techs needing different time to complete the same task, whether or not they are "dogging it." Even a NOT-dogging-it Tech may not be as skilled as another on a particular kind of problem, or can run into other problems, or see something else that needs to be taken care of in the same apartment, or the resident is home and wants it explained to them, or the tech didn't have a needed part, or blah blah blah. So it's not to rate the tech, or berate the tech either. It's to have a concept of how much we have to do on a property, vs. how much one person CAN do, and plan accordingly. We discovered, for example, that no matter how we try, residents are going to "save" their work order needs for the first of the month when they pay rent. So we purposely don't let any leases expire at the end of the month, hoping the maintenance team isn't saddled with BOTH a ton of work orders AND a ton of turns and renewal work orders. That helps our workflow, and we continually look for other ways to help make life easier and work more efficient for our team!

This is a lot of words to say, but we look at all things with the goal of making the word order process better!

Whoa! Mindy. You wrote: "I bet that is the number one complaint most Maintenance Techs report, too."

No, that is not the number one complaint. People who have no understanding of apartment buildings (tenants) call other people who have no understanding of apartment buildings (office workers) and describe vaguely that there is a problem… that's just the nature of the beast. Without changing the system completely there is no cure for this. The maintenance person just has to get used to the fact that he/she is working for people who don't know with any precision what he/she does. It's both boon and bane for the maintenance person. If you are a bad maintenance person and don't know a coping saw form an easy-out, it's great because you won't get fired. You can take a nap in the middle of a turn, talk on the phone, surf the web for porn, and your "Supervisor" thinks that you deserve a promotion because you show up every day and you've been there for five years. You must be doing the job well. From the competent maintenance person's perspective, it's much the same as toting around a bag of rocks. The office workers are just something pointless that gets in the way of fixing whatever it is. That is the number one complaint of the competent folks, the Bozos think everything is fine. That IS the number one complaint, but I wouldn't admit it if I was working for you.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program…. How can we make the work order process better? What does the office need to know and how can it be effectively transmitted?