Key Takeaways
- Centralized asset information helps senior living teams spend less time searching for answers and more time addressing resident and facility needs.
- Capturing maintenance history in a CMMS preserves critical building knowledge as experienced employees retire or move on.
- Mobile access to work orders, asset records and costs helps connect daily maintenance activities to operational and capital planning.
Walk into a senior living community and the facilities and maintenance team is likely managing a long list of competing priorities: a resident’s room that needs attention, an HVAC issue in one of the buildings, preventive maintenance that cannot be missed, a recurring plumbing problem, vendor coordination and a backlog of work orders.
Now imagine doing all of that with fewer experienced people, rising labor costs and an aging workforce. For senior living operators, facing workforce challenges also means addressing operational ones.
Research underscores this knock-on effect. A recent study found that labor shortages and rising costs remain significant industry concerns post-pandemic, with the senior living sector needing approximately one million additional workers over the next decade.
While technology is increasingly being used to support workforce efficiency and operational performance, the greater opportunity in senior living is to create more consistent processes, improve access to data and make maintenance work easier to manage.
Put asset information within reach
Ask a maintenance director how much time their team spends looking for information, and the answer may be difficult to quantify. Which air handler is having the recurring problem? When was it last serviced? How many times does it require repair?
Scattered across paper records, emails and individual employees, siloed asset information and maintenance histories can slow access to critical information.
A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) gives facilities teams a centralized place to organize and find vital asset data, including work orders, maintenance history and preventive maintenance programs. For a busy community, this 360-degree view can mean fewer calls, fewer searches and the ability to make quicker, data-backed decisions.
Don’t let institutional knowledge walk out the door
Senior living communities rely heavily on experienced facilities and maintenance professionals who know their buildings inside and out. They know which boiler tends to cause problems. They remember the history of a recurring leak. But that knowledge can be difficult to replace when experienced employees retire or leave.
In addition to needing one million new workers in the coming years, senior living communities report turnover rates approaching 47% among frontline caregivers. Combined with the retirement of experienced leaders and technicians, the sector faces a growing risk of losing the institutional knowledge that keeps operations, compliance and resident services running smoothly.
A centralized management system creates continuity by documenting the details that are often difficult to capture elsewhere. Maintenance work, service records, asset history and repair decisions become part of a permanent operational record that can be accessed by the entire team. The result is greater consistency, better-informed decision-making and less dependency on information that exists only in someone's memory.
Connect the field to the front office
Maintenance work happens across the community, not behind a desk. Mobile access to work orders, asset records and maintenance history gives technicians the information they need where the work is happening. Assignments can be received, completed work documented and records updated in real time, reducing administrative effort and eliminating the delays associated with paper-based processes.
As maintenance activity is consistently recorded, organizations gain a clearer picture of asset condition, work volume and resource requirements. Operations leaders gain greater insight into how equipment issues affect daily activities and the resident experience. Executive and finance teams can more easily identify spending patterns, evaluate asset performance and anticipate future capital needs.
Combining asset conditions, maintenance history, costs and work activity in a single view creates stronger alignment between day-to-day maintenance operations and long-term planning decisions.
Smarter operations start with better information
Technology won’t eliminate the workforce challenges facing senior living, but it can help facilities, maintenance and operations teams spend less time managing information and more time caring for their communities.
For maintenance leaders, that means better access to the information needed to get work done. For operations leaders, it means greater visibility into how assets and maintenance affect the community. For executive leaders, it means better information to support operational and capital decisions.
The goal is to, in addition to digitizing existing processes, connect the information senior living teams already generate every day and turn it into better decisions for today’s operations and tomorrow’s investments.
Discover how Siemens helps senior living communities connect asset information, preserve institutional knowledge and support smarter maintenance options. Explore the future of senior living operations.
