Making a switch
Martha’s Vineyard Hospital is critical to their island community as the island’s largest healthcare provider, offering emergency services, outpatient, operating room and acute care from their 25-bed critical access hospital. Their community size fluctuates from 17,000 residents to more than 100,000 in the summer.
All the more reason why they were happy to find operations software designed for their unique environment.
Before TheWorxHub, they were using MaintenanceEdge (a legacy product from Brightly, which was later acquired by Siemens) to manage maintenance tasks, work orders and preventive maintenance — but it wasn’t designed for the regulatory environment within healthcare. “We were looking for a product that made it easier to manage our regulatory environment and the hospital operation as a whole,” says Braden Witt, Lead Mechanic. “It was just a no-brainer to switch over to TheWorxHub for a product that was built for healthcare.”
They’ve also benefitted from the ease of use and workflow improvements from the mobile operations management system with solutions for maintenance, PO and inventory, analytics and more.
“TheWorxHub takes the many layers of your hospital operation and combines them into one really easy-to-use feature,” Witt says. “We’ve seen a huge increase to the services we’re able to provide to our community through a safer, more streamlined operation.”
Empowering the team and growing preventive maintenance
The facilities team at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital consists of Witt, the director, manager and four technicians. More than half (374) of the hospital’s 633 employees are registered work requesters in TheWorxHub.
This rise in communication with better software has led to more trust and transparency from their team to others who request work, Witt says. “Requesters see us showing up to something within seconds of a request coming in. Departments know that when they put in a ticket, they’re getting service and they’re seeing resolution,” Witt says. “At least once a week, I hear someone say: ‘Wow, that was fast!’”
He also attributes the increase in service to the technicians using tablets to complete work. This has led to a noticeable improvement in their completion times.
“Our completion times have skyrocketed from being months down to 3-5 days on average,” Witt says. He goes on to talk about the impact on inventory. “It’s saving money in purchasing, as we are more able to do bulk purchasing, see what’s coming in and what’s needed.”
More preventive and predictive
The impact on their preventive maintenance program has been “one of the biggest benefits,” according to Witt. Where they used to be doing 20 preventive maintenance tasks (or PMs) before TheWorxHub, they’re now at about 300 a month, which is creating a safer environment with less reactive work.
“TheWorxHub has given us the ability to take the strength of our team and dictate what PMs go to whom, when,” Witt says. “And on days when we have a failure, they’re not catastrophic failures. We’re able to predict a lot more.”
This is critical as customer service becomes even more of a priority for hospitals and the facilities department today. “TheWorxHub gives us the tools to be customer-service focused without compromising our facility focus. It’s given us a better way to communicate with requesters, department managers, stakeholders, etc.,” explains Witt.
Witt trains all new employees on TheWorxHub during employee orientation, so they can know how to communicate with the facilities department. Their detailed PM records also come in handy with technician turnover or new hires, as well as budget planning.
“You’re capturing the technician’s notes and time spent on things, so if you lose a technician, TheWorxHub becomes like a gathering point on that,” Witt says. “As budgets get tighter and tighter, TheWorxHub gives you a great way to validate the work your team does.”
Automated, shareable reports
Not only are the reports out of the system easy to run (saving hours of Witt’s time) and more detailed, but Witt can now automate custom reports for him and others outside of his department. “I can see exactly what I’m spending on belts on a specific air handler with just a few clicks,” Witt says.
This also plays into making requests to replace equipment or launch new projects. “When we come to departments with high-dollar solutions, we’re not pulling that out of thin air. We have multiple layers of data to back it up,” he says.
Another example of a reporting benefit is the dialysis manager at the hospital subscribes to a periodic report on work completed in his department that comes out of TheWorxHub automatically without any extra work from Witt. “Those automated subscribed reports keep stakeholders throughout the building informed, and I don’t even have to think about it,” Witt says.
New way to manage energy
Martha’s Vineyard Hospital has also had success with the Energy Manager solution for utility bill tracking and energy management. “In healthcare, saving energy is becoming a bigger and bigger deal, and it’s really hard to be able to validate energy savings,” Witt says.
After they rolled out a new energy conservation program a few years ago, they needed a way to validate the program and show their successes instead of just paying their energy bills. They’re now able to do that with Energy Manager, which helps them reach their goals of being good stewards of the environment through not just their power, electricity and fuel usage, but also their recycling program, wastewater, solar and more.
“[Energy Manager] gives us that ability with a few mouse clicks to look at 2015 compared to 2019 without having to shuffle paper or Excel spreadsheets or pivot tables,” Witt says. “It makes the technology much more approachable. It’s helped us lower our cost of rolling out some of our energy initiatives.”
Innovating with space visualization
Martha’s Vineyard Hospital is also an early adopter of the Space Management module of TheWorxHub, which Witt says is just another proof point of innovation.
“It’s one of those examples of Brightly [Siemens] seeing the value and capability of the customers and seeing how they can serve them best,” he says. “There are not a lot of products on the market that are as customer-focused as Brightly [Siemens].”
He says one thing he tells people is that he knows everyone he works with by name and that means a lot to feel that level of support. “There’s never been a road mark along the way where I didn’t feel like I had a team behind me,” he says. “With every challenge I face, Brightly [Siemens] has been there to offer me a solution.”