After speaking with countless property managers we heard the same things over and over. Most property management companies are looking for improved oversight and visibility within their maintenance process and searching for ways to improve efficiency and throughput. The reason many of these companies were struggling is because they had no data to help them determine the successes or failures of their current process. We wanted to provide our customers a way to look at their maintenance on a deeper level without spending time pulling manual reports.  Property Meld Insights is a way of doing maintenance differently, providing unmatched visibility into your maintenance process, allowing property managers to assess the health of their maintenance process and identify inefficiencies.

However, for those who don’t have a grasp on what to track or which maintenance metrics are essential, Insights can be overwhelming. To understand why Insights is so revolutionary, you must first understand how data can influence your process and help you optimize.

To help, we have identified which metrics on the Insights dashboard match with specific steps on the Ladder of Maintenance Excellence. The power of Insights and the Ladder of Maintenance Excellence will help you gain a deeper understanding of the importance of maintenance analytics and how they can help you achieve excellence in maintenance.

Step One: Effective Communication

Communication is essential for a property maintenance process; without an effective communication model, your maintenance process will fall apart. This is why you’ll find effective communication as the foundation of the Ladder. Achieving effective communication ensures that all players involved in the maintenance process know what is going on and can participate. In other words, every individual in the process should know what is happening and when to engage.

There are two main data awareness points that you should keep in mind when trying to achieve effective communication.

1. The property management company knows all communication
2. All parties are aware of the communication

Insights has a few essential metrics to track when determining if you have achieved effective communication. The Insights dashboard breaks up metrics based on the step of the ladder they are associated with.

Step Two: Scheduling Efficiency

The second step on the Ladder of Maintenance Excellence is scheduling efficiency. Achieving scheduling efficiency means having the right resources in the right place and at the right time. Scheduling efficiency is not always about being the fastest but ensuring you assign the right vendor or technician to the job quickly at a time that works for your resident. Improving scheduling efficiency leads to higher resident satisfaction and means you can increase your output without increasing your resources, positively impacting your bottom line.

There are a few data points to keep in mind when analyzing your scheduling efficiency.

1. Jobs/day
2. Speed to Schedule
3. Speed of Repair
4. Segmented Cycle Times

These metrics can be found in Property Meld’s Insight dashboard and more in-depth metrics of scheduling efficiency, such as the number of Melds open longer than 7 or 14 days. This can help you determine if you have a high amount of backlog and identify what may be causing it.

Step Three: Staffing Efficiency

You will be able to tackle staffing efficiency once you have mastered effective communication and scheduling efficiency. Staffing efficiency helps you measure the output of your maintenance team and determine if you have the right size team to keep up with the number of maintenance requests you receive. Ensuring you have the right amount of team members is crucial to maintaining a healthy speed of repair.

To measure your staffing efficiency, keep an eye on these metrics.

1. Jobs/day
2. Coordinator Throughput
3. Technician Utilization Rate
4. Vendor Throughput
5. Work orders created versus closed

Insights allows you to see how many Melds have been created versus closed in a specific time range. This enables you to determine if you have a backlog or if your staff can effectively and efficiently complete the assigned work.

As we get further in the Ladder of Maintenance Excellence in The Maintenance Minute, look for a part two of this article!