MISSION: ACCOMPLISHED
M AT T K A U T Z K Y
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D I R E C T O R O F FA C I L I T I E S
information desk volunteers, and put in the appropriate staff mailboxes.
There was no way to know who wrote the notes, and the scraps of paper
could (and did) easily go missing.
Even if they didn’t disappear, they weren’t always specific. “It might
say, ‘Door doesn't work in X area," Matt says. “And I thought, OK, which
door? Northeast? Southwest? What if it’s a whole bank of doors?”
All this translates, of course, to people-hours and the costs associated
with them.
“It’s really hard to put a tangible number on it,” he points out. “But
even if you take conservative estimates, you’re spending at least half an
hour trying to figure out each note. That’s 30 minutes of lost time that
you could’ve spent actually solving the problem.”
Excel fell short, too
Everybody loves a good spreadsheet — but it’s simply not the best
solution for facilities management at a large church.
When Matt took on the facilities director role, an Excel spreadsheet
held 70 to 80 different maintenance to-do items. Staff members could add
to it, but rarely did — except for maintenance staff. And even they rarely
attached their names to the notes they left in the spreadsheet. Adding to
the complexity, when an item was resolved, it was deleted.
“We had no way to answer some key questions: How was that resolved?
What did we do? Did we budget anything for that? Where did we spend from?"
Matt explains. “Then, you're cross-referencing an accounting platform
and previous emails and so on, which make it quite challenging.”
Relying on recommendations,
first-hand research
Matt knew the church needed a better facilities management system.
To find it, he first reached out to some former colleagues who managed
facilities at the state Capitol. He also asked good friends who managed
the YMCA. (“They've got a lot of equipment, and they run tight on their
budget,” he explains.)
He took their recommendations and did online demos of each —
about three systems in all. One of his key criteria was an open, highly
customizable platform.
AkitaBox [ home.akitabox.com ], a building infrastructure data
platform, was particularly well suited to how Matt wanted to run
facilities at Blackhawk Church: “It provided an opportunity for me to go
beyond a traditional facilities management standpoint of, This is broken;
it's in this room; it's this ID or this QR code.”
Once the decision was made, implementing AkitaBox only took 90
days — about half as long as Matt expected. “When I came to them, I
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BLACKHAWK CHURCH
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MIDDLETON, WI
said, ‘We've got time. Let's do this right,’” he recalls. “They told me, ‘Oh,
we'll do it right — but it won’t take that long.’”
A big part of getting implementation correct from the get-go was
categorizing and cataloging all the QR codes on the large church campus.
To identify them, Matt credits his AkitaBox Customer Success Manager,
Lucas Carr, for asking the right questions. “It was clear he wasn’t reading
off a script,” Matt adds. “He knew what he was doing.”
Matt continued to collect the scraps of paper with maintenance
requests on them. He went out of his way to ensure that he not only
understood them, but that they were represented in the new system.
Having spent five years on staff at Blackhawk at that point, Matt says
there were quite a few “constant” maintenance items to incorporate.
“We've got a lot of great volunteer leaders and staff members who tinker
with things like water fountains, refrigerators, light fixtures, and so
on,” he says. “And I’m thinking, This is about the fourth time somebody has
tinkered with that item. If someone has touched something five times, and
the problem still isn’t solved, then maybe it’s time to call a contractor. I
want to know those things.”
With work order histories stored in the AkitaBox software, these
kinds of insights can easily be illuminated across their entire campus.
Between Matt’s and Lucas’s efforts, every maintenance item on
campus was added to the AkitaBox system — from fire annunciators to
floor drains, sinks to stoves, even refrigerators and microwaves. Even
individual toilets (62 in all) have their own codes.
A large number of floor drains were another perpetual maintenance
problem for Matt and his team.
Some of them are particularly prone to drying out, creating an
expensive repair. Matt knew where every drain is located, including
the most problematic ones; however, the built construction documents
didn’t accurately reflect this information. He wanted to create a specific
recurring work order that would have his team members routinely pour
water down these drains. Matt and Lucas did a walk-through, and each
drain was plotted as a pin drop in AkitaBox’s Floor Plan Viewer.
“Now, when I open up the system, I can just say, ‘Give me plumbing;
give me drains,’ and boom! All of them are there,” Matt says. “I create a
work order off of that, and now my maintenance staff never misses one.”
With a paper-based system, of course, there used to be no good way
of tracking this information. “Did they get all the drains? Do I have any
way of checking that? Do they even know where all the drains are?” Matt
asks. “I can’t assume that’s always the case. The AkitaBox software has
alleviated this concern.”
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