Summary
With a 200,000-square-foot facility and plans to expand to a second location, Princess House credits Asset Essentials for helping it stay ahead of challenges and streamline its operations. From passing down knowledge to the next generation of maintenance leaders to quickly addressing obstacles, Asset Essentials has been an integral part of Princess House’s strategy for over 20 years. The software consistently empowers Princess House’s team to work more effectively, enabling them to track and manage every maintenance task for sustained growth.
Background
When Maintenance Supervisor Garry Young joined Princess House in 1993, one of his primary goals was to launch an effective preventive maintenance program. It took him 10 years to find and implement the right software program and he’s been using Asset Essentials ever since.
The software program has grown and changed with the company over the years, providing all the tools needed to manage facility maintenance, Young says. As Princess House plans to open a second facility in Texas, Young expects the new facility to adopt Asset Essentials as well.
Building and maintaining an effective preventive maintenance program
Before coming to Princess House in 1993, Young had worked in facilities maintenance at other companies. Through that experience, he learned the importance of an effective preventive maintenance program and he wanted to build such a program at Princess House.
For 10 years, Young reviewed multiple computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) each year, trying to find one that would be the right fit. Many of the tools he looked at required customers to purchase several separate modules to achieve the full solution he wanted. When he found Brightly’s Asset Essentials (which has since become part of the Siemens portfolio) in 2003, “I realized this was the tool I’d been looking for,” Young says. “Asset Essentials included all the modules we needed in one package.”
Young implemented the program, entered all the assets and launched a preventive maintenance plan that has been going strong for 22 years. “Our PM program is our biggest success with Asset Essentials,” he says. “The ability to track the history of each piece of equipment is very helpful, and we’ve also come up with a creative way to track where all our calls go and how much time we spend on them.”
Planning for succession
After 31 years at Princess House, and more than 40 years in the facility maintenance industry, Young has become increasingly interested in passing down his knowledge to prepare for his eventual retirement. Over the past three years, he has trained Maintenance Mechanic Ean Trusler to learn the functions of the maintenance department and Asset Essentials has been instrumental in that process.
“Asset Essentials has made it very easy to learn. We’d be nowhere without Asset Essentials. It’s like having another brain,” says Trusler.
In addition to training Trusler in various maintenance techniques including carpentry, millwrighting and cabling, Young has instilled the importance of using the software to track maintenance work. “The people in the corporate office don’t usually come down and see what you’re doing, so it’s very important to know how to track your time and your labor,” Trusler says. “Tracking your work in the software is the only way to prove that you’ve done the work.”
Overcoming challenges
“Brightly’s customer support [now Siemens] is the most important aspect of our relationship,” Young says. “With the online chat function, I can solve the problem 99.9% of the time. If not, the help guide resources are available, or I can always pick up the phone and talk to someone in person if I need to.”
After using Brightly products — which are now in the Siemens family — every day for more than 20 years, Young says he would recommend Asset Essentials to his peers in facility maintenance. “It’s a very robust system and you’ll get a very good ROI,” he says. “If you stay with, manage it, and get your team on the same page, you’ll have very good success.”