UpKeep

“I’m focused on long-term accountability,” John explained. “I want to ensure that we’re doing the work that we say we’re doing. Right now, someone could just close out a work order and say they completed it. Finding a way to verify the work actually got done will hopefully help us reduce our reactive downtime even further in the long run.”

“It means we make much more cost-effective decisions,” John said. “For example, let’s say our Kansas plant loses a pump. Their maintenance manager can see that we have that pump in the Florida plant inventory. That means they don’t have an exorbitant expense of buying another pump, and we bring our own inventory down for the company as a whole. We’ve basically created an internal Walmart for Rehrig Pacific.”

“I think the thing that I like about UpKeep the most is how intuitive it is for a minimally trained user,” John said. “The way that the system is structured; it’s really easy to use whether you’re on a mobile platform or on your desktop. It’s one reason I selected it.”

““Since the maintenance technicians now add photos, we can see exactly what they did and when they did it to resolve a problem,” explained Todd. “In the past, we might have an air conditioner leak at one location. A technician may be thinking, ‘I think this unit leaked before, maybe two or three years ago, but I can’t remember exactly.’ Now, we have a complete history of what’s happening with each asset in each location.””

““It’s all black and white, right there for you to see, so there’s no question. I’ve had a few cases that were not done according to the request. I could quickly look at the case, see that more needed to be done, and add a note of what needed to happen in order for the case to be completed.””

““If a gate is broken and we need to leave it open in the evening, the site manager team must note that extra patrol was brought in,” Todd explained. “Once the gate is fixed, the notes and photos should be in the system so we can verify online that the gate is in good working order again.””

““We developed protocols around what technicians have to do, for instance, if they open up a high priority case,” Todd explained. “Those cases mean they need to be handled immediately. We can see if the technicians complied and hold them accountable.””

““The main pain point with our old system was the lack of a consolidated place that brought all our information together,” said Todd Rudnianyn, Real Estate Sales Associate. “We had no location where everyone could get updates on maintenance cases, photos or other data. We had limited access; managers only had hard copies of older reports at each location. We wanted a solution that allowed everyone to see what was going on with all maintenance cases in real time, at any location.””

““UpKeep helped us have the conversations we never had before — about SLAs, asset life, priorities. That shift was huge.””

““UpKeep met our teams where they are — in the field,” Ross said.”

““Everything was considered urgent,” Ross recalled. “We couldn’t prioritize effectively because we didn’t have structure.””

““Our facilities are the backbone that enable our teams to serve communities,” Ross said. “When they fail, we fail to serve.””

“It’s really just taking the time to make sure that they get it, they understand it, and they’re not going to walk away still being frustrated. It’s a matter of slowly building up those relationships, working with people and really understanding where they’re coming from on the tech piece. It’s been a long process, but it’s been well worth it.”

“I have one technician who’s not tech-savvy but has such a great attitude,” Chris said. “He pushes me to do a little more and helps me spread a learning spirit to the rest of the team. We’ve actually gotten to the point where he’s actually showing me stuff in UpKeep that I haven’t tried or seen before. So that’s really exciting.”

“They know they can come to me, and I will help champion their ideas,” Chris said.”

“UpKeep has a relatively easy, intuitive feel about it, yet it was a little bit of a challenge to get it downloaded properly across more than 60 operators out in the field,” Eric said. “We wanted to get it done right, establish alerts and the set points, and all the other details. When someone’s phone breaks, you’re doing it all over again. It can be easy for team members to get frustrated with the technology. Chris and other supporting team members have been incredibly compassionate and patient in working with our diverse workforce in terms of implementing the technology.”

“I absolutely think that by rolling in our daily safety plan process into UpKeep and having our team members take a minute to pause puts everybody in a better position to be safe and successful.”

“All those different alerts actually come to my phone each morning so I can see that the team’s getting going for the day, engaging in the process and whether there are any issues to review.”

“We want to communicate those safety plans, review them, and have good discussions related to them with our employees,” Eric said. “We also wanted to be able to capture data and analytics related to safety. UpKeep helps us capture those important and impactful items that are within our daily safety plans.”

“I would take the ideas from our management team and share it with the employees in the field,” Chris explained. “They can bring their ideas about how the technology is used, what the interface looks like, and the effects it’s having upstream or downstream, and we can make changes to improve the process.”

“It was really about engaging the group, working through the tool, and setting expectations on both sides of the fence,” Eric said. “That includes the users within our maintenance group that are executing work as well as the requesters.”

“I think we’ve been successful because we got a good team together and really created some buy-in and engagement,” Eric said. “We showed them what we were thinking and why we were thinking of making the changes. We included an array of different team members, including selecting some of our more challenging team members. We knew if we could get buy-in from those folks early on, we had a better chance of success.”

“UpKeep had the combination of initial simplicity of meeting our immediate needs and the potential to grow and add new features for us.”

“However, UpKeep seemed to meet our initial needs and do it in a fashion that offered us some customization ability but not too many options. It checked a lot of the boxes for our immediate needs.”

“We were using a really antiquated system that consisted of Excel spreadsheets, phone calls, and an embarrassing amount of emails. We needed to find a better way to manage it all.”