Work Request Management (call center?)
A question for my fellow CMMS folks here. How do you manage your information workflow with Work Requests? Not necessarily from a software workflow/SLA perspective, but, the process your people follow.
In my last company, a dedicated call center entered all calls into our CMMS and it routed to the appropriate shop, based on the problem type/trade. The supervisor of each skilled craft then distributed the work to the mechanics.
In my current company’s corporate buildings, a non-dedicated group monitors an email box and enters work requests into archibus. We’ve got one mechanic per building, no specialized trades, so that one person handles everything that comes through their building; issuing, updating, closing out.
In the above cases, all work is being done in-house.
Now, I’ve just rolled out work orders to our scattered leased office spaces around the country. Since they are small spaces, they have no on-site maintenance, so, someone here will call out a 3rd party to perform the work, following up with the occupant and the contracted party to ensure the work is completed, issuing and closing out the work order as appropriate.
I’m just wondering how other folks in similar situations might be handling the workflow.
Have one person ultimately responsible for entering, reviewing followup and closing out the requests?
Have a single person enter, then different project managers or similar farming out the work and entering their own-follow up?
Have each manager of the work be the only one touching their work requests from start to finish?
The software can obviously be modified at my whim, but, I’d like to assist in making the actual process as pain-free and logical as possible, so, I’d be interested to hear from anyone, similar or different, for feedback and ideas.
Re: Work Request Management (call center?)
I did receive one reply sharing some thoughts on the Archibus forums: http://www.archibus.com/forum/messag...37108F0EE3796D
Quote:
Originally Posted by Arslan
We don’t have any FM ARCHIBUS related components in place but we will soon. I can however comment from a Move work request point of view.
We have enough moves to have 2 full time employees from the contractor work with our own organizations employees. Both coordinators from the team handle the move requests coming in through ARCHIBUS and the contractor then replicates the information in their work order system for their trades people.
In my experience so far, I think a good set up would be (unless ARCHIBUS is dominant enough within your organization to be your point to point solution):
1. A single portal via a CRM application for submitting requests that gathers contact info and enough information to know what technical system to route specifics. This system will keep all of your customer information.
2. Whatever triggers that the request is ARCHIBUS related will be picked up via ARCHIBUS Connectors and then populate your work request in ARCHIBUS at which point you begin performing work through the ARCHIBUS framework which can help eliminate customization because perhaps it does not jive with how the customer should be notified.
3. The CRM and ARCHIBUS communicate information back and forth on keeping the customer in the loop.
4. The CRM provides ends up housing data on customer satisfaction while ARCHIBUS being the more internal performance focused system houses data on response times, costing, and number of work orders per building etc.
Looking forward to hearing what others think.
I should have mentioned that we don’t have this system that I dream of in place but I hear it come up as a solution most often.
I’m awaiting final approval from our HR to improve our very SEMI automatic connection to PeopleSoft. As you say though, I definitely used future opportunities such as Finance (which happens to reside in PeopleSoft also) as leverage in my business case.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wanderer
thank you for sharing your thoughts, that is an approach which I had not considered.
I generally prefer to keep all information in a single system when I can, due to duplication efforts, but, using connectors sounds like it would simplify matters.
I’m not currently using any connectors, so I’m not certain the specifics of how it would work. Our system is hosted externally, but, I’d like connections to our HR system, so that we can reduce the time spent keeping employee data current. Waiting while they complete a system change, then I’ll talk with them and see if we can get that going.
Becoming comfortable with that procedure could open up future system changes for me. (not sure how our firewalls will come into play, etc)
