Across the globe, organizations are working to ensure employee safety during this COVID-19 pandemic.

Whether by deep cleaning facilities or reorganizing maintenance schedules to practice social distancing, companies are using all the tools at their disposal to mitigate risk in the face of this unprecedented event. Understanding how best to use your asset maintenance software to limit infection has never been more important, both for keeping your teams safe and for ensuring critical maintenance is conducted in your facilities.

For current customers of Accruent’s vx Maintain solution, we have highlighted a few features below that can aid in workplace safety and business continuity during COVID-19.

Use site audit feature to ensure critical supplies are on hand.

Ensure that your locations have ample cleaning supplies to ensure the health and safety of your customers and employees with the vx Maintain Site Audit feature.

The Site Audit functionality can be used to schedule weekly (or whatever interval) site checks to proactively identify locations that need critical supplies. Learn how to utilize the site audit feature.

Streamline work order management to focus on critical asks.

vx Maintain users can use custom-defined criteria to set up notifications to monitor work orders that directly affect health and safety. By using a flexible rule builder, users can monitor things like when a Health and Safety Work Order is created or when a particularly busy location has a critical piece of equipment go down. Notifying key people about this information immediately can result in quicker resolution.

You may need to temporarily pause your planned preventive maintenance (PPM) work orders due to a change in a location's hours or to reduce the number of unnecessary visitors to your locations. This can be done via the PPM group contract update tool, which admin users can use to update things like "Next Run" dates or contract "start/end" dates to pause these work orders temporarily. Learn how to pause Work Orders temporarily.

You can also stop the auto-dispatch of work orders so you can implement a manual review prior to dispatch. Work Orders must be created with accurate information so they can be resolved immediately, holding Health and Safety Work Orders for manual review ensures they get the attention they need before being dispatched. Users that have this rule in place can mark the rule inactive. Learn more about the Dispatch Authorization rule.

Work order scripts.

Additional questions can be added to work orders at completion or creation and allow vx Maintain customers to gain further information from providers or site-level personnel on work orders. The script option enables you to set a standard set of questions to provide you with the context at the site level to manage these specific work order appropriately.

This additional context helps ensure each work order is triaged appropriately, and vendors have site-specific information available to them when completing the work. Clients can also configure the feature so that particular responses to the work order scripts will automatically tag the work order as COVID-19 related (Users will need to set up a Tag Reason).

Use vx Maintain to track COVID-19 related work orders.

You can track work orders specific to your COVID-19 response efforts by creating a global problem type at the fixture level to allow for filtering, or by creating a Work Order Tag and applying it to related Work Orders. Both of these solutions will provide the visibility and downstream reporting that this response requires.

If you choose to create a COVID-19 problem type, you can associate a preferred provider to that problem type. You can also assign a P1 Emergency priority rating by adding a work order creation constraint that makes only that priority available, ensuring COVID-19 work orders are automatically treated with the utmost priority.

Contactless site sign-off.

Clients can disable site sign-off on the provider’s device at Job Complete to maintain infection control. Work orders can still be reviewed from the Site Manager’s Dashboard at a later time.

Easily communicate with your service providers.

Contacting service providers.

If you have updated your PPM schedules or made any process changes, you will likely need to reach out and update your service providers to let them know about these changes. vx Maintain offers a report that can quickly provide clients a list of contact information for all service providers. Lean how to create a report to contact service providers.

vx Maintain trained service providers.

You can also generate a report that provides a list of service providers trained on using vx Maintain that serve your specific geographical area. This can be filtered by asset category to help you narrow down your search and quickly identify providers that can solve your facilities needs immediately.

If you need assistance in finding additional service providers for your sites, you can contact us.

Expense tracking for long-term monitoring

Site events.

When the threat of COVID-19 has passed, understanding the cost of responding to this threat will be valuable information. You can track related expenses by creating a ‘site event’ to associate with your sites and work orders for a specific period of time. This will allow you to track the costs related to any insurance claims or for long-term business planning. Learn how to create Site Events.

Account codes.

Another method to track expenses related to COVID-19 is to set up an account code. Once set up, you can change the account code on related work orders so that when they are moved over to accounting, they can be tracked via that account code.

Note: If you have an integration with your Finance System you may not want to modify your Account Codes and instead choose another mechanism for expense tracking.

Finance codes.

Finally, the flexibility of Finance Codes 1, 2 and 3 allows for expense tracking related to COVID-19. Using this method ensures that any existing integrations with Account Codes and your Finance system remain unchanged. Finance Codes 1,2 and 3 allow you to manually update a work order with the proper code and capture that it is associated with the COVID-19 effort.

Looking forward.

In times of uncertainty, it is increasingly valuable to understand the breadth of the solutions you have available and how best you can utilize them. These best practices are intended to guide your organization on how to mitigate risk and manage business continuity through this challenging period we are all facing.

If you have questions or need help implementing these ideas, our team is ready to help. Contact us at verisaesupport@accruent.com.